It wasn't until the more recent scandals around mother and baby homes, following the discovery in 2013, 2014, of nearly 800 babies and small children who had been, what is the right word to use, let's say deposited, buried in a septic tank on the grounds of a former mother and baby home in County Galway in Tume, and this kind of public scandal around the homes, that I began to realize that the secrets weren't only my family secrets, that what I was looking at here, and part of the reason I felt such shame around it in fact, was that this was a set of national secrets.

Claire Wills, welcome to Writer's Voice.

Thank you for having me.

This book, Missing Persons or My Grandmother's Secrets, is a deeply personal exploration of your family's history centered around an illegitimate, in quotes, pregnancy, because I don't like that term illegitimate, being myself the product of a union between two people who were not married.

This happened in the 1950s, where a mother and her infant entered what was called mother and baby homes in Ireland.

You call it a story of generation gone wrong, a mother not married and a child stifled.

Tell us, why did you decide to unearth these family secrets?

Well, I had a child on my own, myself, when I was in my mid-twenties.

I was a student at the time.

I got pregnant and decided to go ahead and have my child, who's now 35.

It was around that time, and I think because of that experience, that my aunt told me about a cousin who I never got to meet.

She was seven years older than me, born in 1955, but she had never been allowed to belong.

I agree with you, the word illegitimacy is a horrible word, but there's something that it says, I think, about belonging and legitimacy that I think is important for us to think about.

So there I was in my mid-twenties, feeling that I was in the same situation as the woman who my uncle had got pregnant.

I know very little about their relationship.

I don't know how long they were lovers for or anything like that.

It was a tremendous shock, a shock not only for me, but for my cousins who also learned about it at the same time.

For a very long time, I felt, I'm going to use the word again, illegitimate in wanting to know more about my cousin.

I was brought up in England.

My mother, who was from a small farm in West Cork, born in 1930, left in 1948 when she was 18 to come and work in England, to train to be a nurse like so many other Irish women, and like one of her sisters, in fact.

So even though I had a very close relationship with Ireland, and we went back every summer and close relationship with all my cousins and my grandmother, I didn't feel exactly legitimate or allowed to try to find out more about my cousin for a very long time, like sort of 30 years.

I did try and find out anyway, but I felt awkward about it.

And it wasn't until the more recent scandals around mother and baby homes following the discovery in 2013, 2014, of nearly 800 babies and small children who had been, what is the right word to use, let's say, deposited, buried in a septic tank on the grounds of a former mother and baby home in County Galway in Shume.

And this kind of public scandal around the homes that I began to realize that the secrets weren't only my family secrets, that what I was looking at here, and part of the reason I felt such shame around it, in fact, was that this was a set of national secrets.

And so that's a very long, meandering answer to why I felt I wanted to write about this.

Yeah, your book really weaves together these two strands, the personal and the historical or systemic picture of this construction of birth legitimacy and illegitimacy, which is really fascinating.

And I wonder if you could actually talk a bit more about what were the social forces that impacted this construction of illegitimacy, because they actually changed over time.

This was new to me.

I thought that Ireland, you know, had always been extremely traditional and it just took a really, really long time for this to change.

But in fact, you find the roots back in the famine, the Irish famine of the mid-1800s.

Yeah, so Patrick Cavanagh, the poet, is probably kind of a lodestar in this, you know, his poem, The Great Hunger, written in 1942, talks about the kind of sexual hunger and the kind of failure of the family, which he's clearly rooting in the great famine of the 1840s.

And I did find that the more I looked at my own family's history, the more the story got rooted further and further back.

So the book is constructed really out of talking to my mom over a period of, well, I suppose over my entire life, but piecing together stories that my mother told me and my grandmother told her.

And one of the stories that my mother led me to was the fact that my grandmother also had not been married when she first got pregnant in 1920.

And when I looked back at her background, she was born in 1891.

This is all in very poor land in rural area of West Cork.

When I look back at her birth in 1891, I have a suspicion, I can't prove it, that she herself was not the daughter of the people that she thought were her parents.

She was born much, much later.

And she had sisters of 18 and 19.

And my guess is actually that she may well have been the daughter of one of those sisters, one of those people she thought were her sisters, let's get that right, who emigrated to the Boston area a few years later.

And what I became really interested in was the way, the informal mechanisms that families had in that post-famine period, 1860s, 70s, 80s, and certainly into the 90s, of dealing with extramarital sex.

I mean, really, I think it's important for us to remember, the problem here is not firstly the children who were born out of wedlock, as it were, but the sex that leads to it.

This is the stuff that has to be hidden.

People clearly were having sex, and demographers get very puzzled by the, it can't be the case, and it isn't the case, that Irish families had less sex than other people.

So why were there, what happened to these children?

And the implication is that people found, families found informal ways, such as a grandmother bringing up the daughter of one of their children as their own, or informal fostering out, sharing children between cousins and things like that, which doesn't mean to say that the sex and the pregnancies weren't being kept secret, they were, but different methods were found in the pre-independence period to handle it.

And one of them was a very common method of getting married two or three months in, discovering that you are pregnant.

In the case of my grandmother, she was six months pregnant when she got married, and it must have been very clear to everybody in the locality when she gave birth three months later, that she wasn't, if I was writing this down, I put this in inverted commas, she wasn't as respectable, in inverted commas, as she might present herself as.

There's a complicated reason, I think, for the six month wait.

But one of the things I became interested in was what happened after Irish independence in 1922, that led to a kind of what I call a bureaucratization of the secrecy around sex.

Now, the Catholic Church had been a kind of supporter of the Irish rural population, it was where they turned for support in the period of under the British Empire.

It was a form of authority that people could trust, where they could not trust the Royal Irish Constabulary or the workhouses, these were institutions run by the British, but the Catholic Church was not run by the British, it was, you know, run by your own, and quite literally your own, because, you know, farmers, sons and daughters went into the church and, you know, became priests and nuns.

So I think there's an important thing that we miss, if we don't think about the impact of that friendly authority, suddenly being given real control in rural areas, and not just rural areas, but it's a rural area I was looking at.

So in the 20s and 30s, and this gets stronger in the 40s and 50s, if you've got sex that needs to be covered up, a child that needs to be kind of hidden, or found another solution for, you use the mother and baby homes.

And it makes sense to me that that would be a kind of new form of bureaucratised secret keeping, which I think in the end, proved absolutely tragic, really, for the Irish family, because it split them off from the people that they had been informally living with before, and put them in institutions, and later, you got adoption, and people got lost completely from the family.

And the conditions were horrific.

I mean, as you point out, you know, the bodies of over 800 children were found tellingly in a septic tank.

But that is just emblematic of the rampant abuse, lack of care of these children.

I mean, how did they die?

Why there was such a high mortality rate?

Talk about the conditions in the mother and baby homes for children and their mothers.

Well, the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes, which was very controversial, the report that it produced in 2020, was extremely controversial, particularly for the way that it placed primary responsibility for what happened to women and children in mother and baby homes, not with the Catholic Church and the social services, but with, and I think I'm quoting here, the parents of the girls, and the fathers of their children.

I'll come back to that in a second, because I think there's something very important to be said around that.

But in terms of the commission of investigations exploration of the conditions, there, the report is kind of extremely articulate.

There was very little money around, the nuns didn't get paid, the money for upkeep of the buildings, particularly actually, if you got sent to a county home, rather than a dedicated mother and baby home where there were, you know, slightly better conditions, the food was terrible.

And, you know, in the 40s, particularly in the 1940s, where economic conditions in general were extremely bad in Ireland, during the period of Irish neutrality, where, you know, actually, mortality rates rose in general, in the population during that period.

But they were extremely high in the mother and baby homes.

And one of the principal causes in, you know, death records is mirasmus, malnutrition.

And there are extremely disturbing accounts of medical examinations of the homes, where, you know, the babies are covered in, in sores, infected buttocks, because they're not being cleaned properly.

You know, the laundry is being done, but the babies themselves are not being cared for.

And I think, again, we have to come back to that question around legitimacy, then these were seen as illegitimate children, not being cared for by the families to whom they belonged, and also not being cared for in the institutions where they were, where they were living.

In fact, just to come back to that, that question of responsibility just seemed to me, and this is one of the spurs to me writing the book, seems to be just such an unhelpful statement to make that it was the parents of the women and girls and the fathers of their children, who were mainly responsible.

Because what we want to know is why, what would cause a family to give up their child to that kind of institution?

There's no explanation of that in the Commission of Investigation report.

And I think, you know, it's a tricky, it's a tricky question to ask.

Because there aren't any records where people explain, you know, they don't write down, you know, I decided to let my daughter go into a mother and baby home and never see my grandchild again, because, you know, we're not going to find that documentation.

But I think we need to be thinking about why.

And one of the answers I came up with was, you know, people trusted the Catholic Church.

They felt that this was the right thing to do.

But you go deeper than that.

Not only, maybe, did they trust the Catholic Church, but the connection that you make between this and land ownership, I think, is very interesting.

The whole issue of legitimacy and illegitimacy really attests to the institution of the agrarian economy of the owning of farmland.

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's key.

I definitely don't think that the primary responsibility also should be placed with the nuns who ran the homes.

There's something that happened in the late 19th century around land ownership, that makes illegitimacy impossible to bear for families.

And one of the kind of gifts to me, really, was realizing that when my grandmother was born in 1891, there was nothing to lose by her being brought up by her grandmother, and that being the person who kind of inherited the home, because there was no land, or there was only a tiny bit of land.

And when she got pregnant in 1920, again, there was no land.

She was a servant, you know, a slightly larger farm.

She lived in on another farm.

And my grandfather, the person who married her, and who is probably the father of the child with whom she was pregnant in 1920, was a laborer.

Neither of them owned anything.

And that is why they could get married and manage things informally.

So you know, America is the problem here in a kind of complicated way, because by the time my uncle got a neighbor pregnant in 1955, my grandparents had inherited money from relatives who had gone to America in the 1890s, and they had bought a farm.

It was a small farm, 30 acre farm, quite good land, but you know, it was a small subsistence level farm, but it was what they had.

And the idea that you could let that sort of go to an illegitimate or unmarried or the non-legitimate family, I think just became too hard to imagine.

In other words, having some stake in the land is what made them participate.

I mean, after all, where does the word legitimate and illegitimate come from?

It comes from the law.

Yeah, from legal ownership.

Yeah.

Legal ownership of the land made, you know, it's not just an Irish thing.

It's what the whole of the 19th century novel is about, you know, and it isn't just a kind of working class or rural underclass level.

It's about participating in a legal system of land ownership, and I assume primogeniture is part of this.

So I wonder if you could talk to that, but also what was the system for people who were large landowners?

Because after all, you know, the same concerns would apply, but they had very different treatment.

Yeah.

The legal ownership of land, I think, is crucial, and there's a quick shift in Ireland.

The 1923 Land Act, I think, is crucial here.

We think of the 1922 independence as central, but I think the 1923 Land Act, which gave many more small landowners ownership of the land rather than tenancy.

If you're a large landowner and you have money to spend, you still don't want your daughter who's got pregnant or your son who's going to bring in somebody who you haven't decided you particularly want in your family, but you can afford to pay to be a private patient or a private client of one of the mother and baby homes.

So the mother and baby homes catered for both private and kind of state or council women and their children.

And if you were a private patient or client, you could pay £100 to leave your child in the home while you were able to leave.

And if you were a council resident, you had to work.

You had to sort of work off your keep.

So for example, many people will have seen the film Philomena, which is about a woman called Philomena Leigh, who lived with her child for three years in a home working off her keep, and then he was adopted.

She didn't want him to be adopted, but she signed the forms not really knowing what they meant.

If we go back to what we were talking about earlier about malnutrition and the death of babies, it is also the case that more babies born to private paying residents of the homes died because they were not looked after by their parents.

They paid the nuns to look after them, and they didn't look after them well.

That's so interesting.

Now, I'd like to talk a little bit about secrets and secrecy, because Claire Will's in this wonderful book, Missing Persons or My Grandmother's Secrets.

This is also really important, the dynamics of secrets and what they meant, how they influenced your relationships within the family and your relationship with your mother, who kept secrets until she didn't, and your own sense of complicity in keeping them and then revealing them.

I just found that very interesting.

So take us through that, those thoughts.

So I go back to when I'm 20, and I discovered that there's this major secret that has been kept, and I tried to ask people about it.

I tried to ask my mother and my aunt, who are the two people who would be able to tell me things.

And they did tell me things, particularly my aunt, in fact.

But for example, the secret about my grandmother being pregnant when she got married took many more decades to come out.

And I think it's partly come out, you know, we all know, I don't know if this is more true of Irish mothers, but you know, mothers, I'm one myself, I like to half tell things.

We kind of want something out there, but we don't quite want the responsibility for telling it.

And I definitely felt that was happening with my mother, who's now 94 nearly, and very aware of the national secrets that have come to light recently around the mother and baby homes.

And I think she's been carrying secrets that she doesn't quite want to tell, but she doesn't want to not tell either.

And for me, that is a kind of central tricky part of the book, because I am betraying family secrets that I can't pretend I'm not.

I feel that I have been given the right to do so by my mother, and yet it is a complicated line to walk.

On the one hand, for example, I would not feel that I did have the right to talk about my grandmother's rejection.

I mean, it's a cruel, cruel bit of behaviour on my grandmother's part.

And certainly on my uncle's part.

Rejection of a neighbour and rejection of her granddaughter.

So I'm not telling particularly benign secrets, I'm telling nasty secrets about my relatives.

And I had to feel in telling them that there was a larger point to it.

I had to feel, you know, the central title to the book is, you know, Missing Persons.

And part of my point in the book is that nearly every Irish family has these missing persons. 57,000 babies were born in mother and baby homes between 1922 and the 1990s.

And that's the very lowest estimate.

All of them had grandparents, four of them.

And they all had mothers and fathers, and those mothers and fathers of those children had siblings and cousins.

So every single person in Ireland, and in the wide world, in Britain, and in America is affected by this keeping of secrets around missing people.

People who are in the family, but appear to be missing.

But I feel really strongly that we will never come to terms with the history of these missing people unless we talk about it.

So I had to make the decision that I was going to betray the secret, even though it's a betrayal.

And what's been the reaction from your own family?

That is interesting.

So they have been very supportive.

I want to make clear that I might be the writer in the family, but I'm not the only person who was shocked by this history, shocked by discovering the story of my cousin.

And we've, over the years, had many conversations, my sisters, cousins, and I, about, and everybody knew that I was writing about it.

And several of my family in Westcourt read the book before it was published, and were very supportive.

I have to say that the way that it was reported in the Irish papers was a shock.

It was a shock to me.

And I was living in England.

And I think, I wish that I had handled that better.

I hadn't anticipated that what, to me, were the important subtleties of why I was telling the secrets were going to just kind of fall out of notice or fall by the wayside in some of the newspaper coverage, which was, you know, pictures of my granny and the terrible things she did, basically.

And that was extremely disappointing and very hard for my family who live in Westcourt.

What would you have preferred the treatment to have been?

What do you think the paper should have said?

Well, in the end, I started giving interviews with, you know, people would start on the line of the newspapers, so tell us about your granny.

What did she do?

And I ended up saying in interviews, no, no, no.

My granny is your granny.

And people looked a bit puzzled, but at least they did get it that this is, yes, it's missing persons and my grandmother's secrets, but it's also yours.

You know, this is a book about how we all need to think about this history.

And I think in the end, people got it in relation to my granny is your granny.

And they also, I think, got my sense that responsibility, which has all these connotations of blame and guilt, is not the best way to think about this history.

Because, you know, if we think in terms of who's responsible, you know, it's a kind of back and forth battle between, is it the families, is it the institutions?

And I think it's not a helpful way to think about it, it's much more helpful to think in terms of a more general cultural answerability to this history.

I am answerable to the things that happened in the 1950s, partly because I benefited.

I mean, I also lost contact with my cousin, who I never knew.

So that's one way in which I didn't benefit from the history, but in other ways, I benefited.

There was quite literally more to go around, we were 12 cousins instead of 13.

And I think people get also, when I say, look, I feel accountable, I feel answerable.

But I also want people to make the next move, which is they are answerable too.

And I think that may be some time coming.

Well, it's a wonderful book, and beautifully written by the way, Missing Persons or My Grandmother's Secrets, and it's just been so interesting to talk with you, Claire Wills, about this book.

Lovely to talk to you.