Secret Child
The shocking true story of a young boy hidden away from his family and the world in a Catholic home for unmarried mothers in 1950s Dublin.Born an 'unfortunate' onto the rough streets of 1950s Dublin, this is the incredible true story of a young boy, a secret child born into a home for unmarried mothers in 1950s Dublin and a mother determined to keep her child, even if it meant hiding him from her own family and the rest of the world.Despite the poverty, hardship and isolation, the pride and hope of a community of women who banded together to raise their children would give this boy his chance to find his real family.A wonderfully heartwarming and evocative tale of working class life in 1950s Dublin and 1960s London.
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HarperElement
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London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperElement 2015
FIRST EDITION
© Gordon Lewis and Andrew Crofts 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Ableimages/Alamy (boy, posed by model); Hugh Doran/Irish Architectural Archive (Dublin background)
Gordon Lewis and Andrew Crofts assert the moral
right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record of this book
is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008127336
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780008127299
Version: 2015-03-16
Contents
Chapter Two: Divine Intervention
Chapter Five: Back to the Beginning
Chapter Eleven: Happy Families
Chapter Thirteen: A Real Education
Chapter Fourteen: A Hard Day’s Night
Chapter Sixteen: The Story of My Mother and Father
Chapter One
The flight was delayed but none of the passengers milling around the lounge seemed to mind too much. There was something of a party atmosphere at that end of the terminal at JFK that day, which added to my own sense of excitement at my impending adventure.
I felt strangely nervous considering how many times I had boarded flights before. This trip, however, was going to be different to the usual round of international business meetings and holidays. This was literally a trip into the unknown, back into a past filled with dark secrets.
It seemed like the whole flight was going to be packed with Irish Americans heading home for the St Patrick’s Day celebrations, many of them wearing something green for the occasion, and some of them already cheered by a couple of pints of Guinness, taken to pass the time. I deliberately avoided eye contact with everyone, wanting to keep myself to myself, protecting my thoughts, preparing myself for whatever might be awaiting me at the other end of the transatlantic flight. The last thing I wanted was to fall into a conversation where someone started asking me questions about my plans for the next few days.
To give myself something to do I pulled the small envelope out of my jacket pocket and stared for the hundredth time at the modest collection of black-and-white photographs it contained. I had stared at them so long and so hard over the previous few months I knew every faded detail by heart. It was like looking into a different world; one that should have been joined to mine by memories and stories shared by previous generations, but was in fact quite alien. I might as well have been looking at pictures of strangers, and those pictures on their own were never going to give up their secrets, however many times I studied them.
‘American Airlines flight to Dublin, Ireland is ready for boarding.’ The announcement made me jump and raised a jovial cheer from some of the revellers at the bar. ‘Will First and Business Class passengers please proceed to the boarding gate.’
I slipped the photos back into my pocket and stood up, walking through to my seat without talking to anyone, only half hearing the conversations going on around me and gratefully accepting a glass of champagne from the smiling stewardess as I settled down and stared out of the window at the tarmac, wanting the flight to be over so that I could get my adventure started. I realised that my nerves were partly caused by fear of what I was about to find out and partly by the thought that I might not find out anything at all. I did not want to have to return to New York none the wiser as to the events surrounding my birth and the early years, which my family seemed determined to keep shrouded in mystery.
Extracting even the barest facts from my cousin, Denis, had been an agony. Anyone would have thought I was trying to pull his teeth out rather than ask a few questions, as each one was met with a sigh and the barest of monosyllabic answers that he could get away with. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was buying him dinner and that he was bound by politeness to stay at the restaurant table for the duration of the meal, he would have made his excuses and left the moment I raised the subject of the past. When I finally had to let him off the hook he swore blind he had told me everything he knew, but I was not at all sure he was telling the truth. That generation seemed to find it an agony to talk about anything personal or emotional, however far in the past it might be. Maybe he had buried some things so deep he had actually lost them for ever.
