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that she had a kidney infection.

‘I handed that in to my school


and they believed it.’
I asked Sarah whether she ever contemplated – like so
many other women – taking the boat across the Irish Sea for
an abortion. Sarah looked horrified.
‘No. No. I wouldn’t even have known. No. No. No. No.
As I said, I was totally gullible. I wouldn’t have anyway
because I couldn’t kill a fly. God, no way.’
‘What about the option of keeping me?’ I asked. ‘Did that
ever cross your mind?’
‘It did, but . . .’ Sarah trailed off. ‘I felt, you know, I left my
name and address and all. I felt OK. That you’d have a good
life. I knew . . . I sensed that I was there. That I was . . .’ She
didn’t finish the sentence.
I remained silent.
‘The whole thing was . . .’ Sarah hesitated, searching for
the right word. ‘I felt I was doing the right thing.’

Sarah went home for Christmas, as usual, but did not tell
anyone in her family about her pregnancy. At the end of the
holidays, she packed her bags and told them she was return-
ing to her job at the school. Instead she headed for Dublin,
where the Catholic charity had secured her temporary lodg-
ings, a house in a Dublin suburb owned by a young couple
with small children. In complete anonymity and with free
room and board, Sarah was guaranteed that she could stay
there until her child was born. The only thing asked of her
was that she occasionally help out with the family’s kids. With
extraordinary speed and efficiency the Irish Church and
medical establishment had colluded to conceal Sarah’s
shameful fall.
Sarah lived quietly in her new lodgings, rarely venturing
outside, her blossoming waistline visible only to Anne and

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Paddy and their three young children. While Paddy was out
at work, Sarah sometimes helped Anne with a little light
housework, and she babysat the three kids. When Sarah had
an appointment at the maternity hospital, Anne would drive
her there, waiting outside until Sarah was done. The mood in
the house was friendly and upbeat, and Sarah at times felt
happy. But every morning when she woke, she felt a concrete
block of anxiety resting on her sternum.
Sarah’s recollection of her interactions with institutions
during her pregnancy is a bit fuzzy, and it’s not clear at
what point she came into contact with St Patrick’s Guild or
on precisely what terms. What is clear is that, having accu-
mulated some savings from her work as a teacher, she was
able to cover the fees charged by the Guild, and thus avoid
the fate of many unmarried mothers: a period of inden-
tured servitude in a mother-and-baby home or a Magdalen
Laundry.
In the early hours of 19 April 1972, Sarah felt the first
pangs of labour pain. She suffered in silence for some time
before quietly slipping out of bed and knocking softly on the
door to the bedroom of the couple she was lodging with,
asking to be driven to Holles Street. I was born at around
two o’clock in the afternoon, a long-limbed baby with a mop
of black hair. According to the letter sent by St Patrick’s
Guild to my parents in July 1996, based on a consultation of
the Guild’s files, Sarah’s labour was ‘normal’, the duration ‘9
hours and 50 minutes’, and my birth weight ‘3320 grams’,
seven pounds and five ounces.
I asked Sarah about the labour that day in February 2011,
in the Marine Hotel.
‘Everything went very smoothly,’ she told me. ‘It was easy,
very easy . . . I couldn’t believe it when everything was over.
I thought it hadn’t even started. I couldn’t say that about the

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subsequent births. Really, it was so different. But maybe you
get little graces, you know?’
Little graces. The grace of a pain-free birth in anticipation
of the real agony that was to come.
‘They didn’t give you to me straight away,’ Sarah said. ‘No,
they didn’t. I’m sure they were aware that, you know . . .’ She
trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
Back on the ward following my birth, Sarah marvelled at
my long arms and legs and delighted in my lazy yawns. I was
placed in a steel cot next to her bed while someone was dis-
patched to call St Patrick’s Guild to tell them that a baby had
arrived. Around her, in happy clusters, sat the adoring fami-
lies of other young mothers. Babies were passed around,
cooed over. Alone in her bed, without her family or her baby,
Sarah watched it all.
‘The nurses were very, very nice. You couldn’t fault them,’
Sarah recalled. ‘I didn’t discuss anything with the other
patients but I felt as if they knew.’
‘Did anyone come to visit you from St Patrick’s Guild?’ I
asked.
‘I can’t remember, but I’m sure arrangements were being
made behind the scenes. But I couldn’t swear to that either. It’s
funny how you block out stuff. It’s very hard to get it back.’
Sarah looked at me with a sudden realization. ‘You’re the
very first person to ever ask me these questions,’ she said.
It took a while for the significance of that statement to
register: in nearly forty years this was the first time that Sarah
had spoken aloud of these events. I knew I had to ask her to
describe the moment when she saw me for the very last time,
but I was dreading it. My heart was racing when finally I
asked: ‘Do you remember what it was like to leave me?’
Sarah was silent. She looked down at her hands. I’m so sorry
to ask you that, I said to her in my mind, I’m so, so sorry.

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‘Yeah,’ Sarah whispers. ‘Yeah, I do.’
Her voice was tiny. ‘The family that I had stayed with, they
would have . . . they would have taken me back for a night or
two. They came to get me. You were left behind in the hos-
pital.’
‘Do you remember what that was like?’ I asked.
There was a long pause. I could almost feel time stand still.
‘Oh, Caitríona, it’s very hard to get words to describe it. You
feel as though you dreamt it all, that the whole thing was a
dream. You felt it didn’t happen. I cried for days afterwards.
I did, I did.’
I was conscious of the agony that I was putting Sarah
through, but I wanted more details: who was in the room,
what was said, whether Sarah had sufficient time alone with
me to say goodbye. But it became clear that Sarah had placed
this memory at the furthest recess of her mind and locked it
away. She reminded me of the survivors of the Srebrenica
massacre I’d met, who often struggled to recall episodes of
shattering distress. Lacking a clear recollection from Sarah, I
am forced to rely on my own imagining. I see myself being
wheeled away in my crib, bawling, wanting my mother. I see
Sarah, still bleeding, her tender breasts leaking milk, bereft as
she leaves the hospital.
In my childhood adoptee daydreams, Sarah had fought
tooth and nail to keep me. It was painful to realize that this
was not the case: there was never a moment when a phalanx
of nurses and nuns struggled to remove me from her
embrace. At the same time, I find it admirable that Sarah did
not spin me a self-absolving line about her decision not to
keep me. The odds were almost impossible: life in Ireland in
1972 as an unmarried mother, without the support of her
family, would have been extraordinarily difficult. All this I
understood. But the child in me wanted to hear that Sarah

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had put up a fight. The mother in me wanted to hear that
too. Since giving birth to Liam and Caoimhe – marvelling at
the physical torque on my heart when I first saw the faces of
my newborn babies – I had struggled to comprehend Sarah’s
decision to give me away. Although the circumstances of our
pregnancies had been miles apart, my experiences stoked an
uncomfortable thought that refused to go away: that no
woman, fully informed and left to her own devices, would
make the decision Sarah had made.

Sarah returned to Anne and Paddy’s house, took to her bed


and cried for a couple of days. Then, with no one to counsel
her, she decided to go home. A week or two back home,
amongst her cheerful noisy siblings and the father she adored,
would help her get her head back in order.
‘Your instinct is to go home,’ she told me that day in the
Marine. ‘I wanted to go home. I needed to.’
Sarah arrived to find her family still reeling in the wake of
her mother’s death. The house was chaotic, her father
depressed. Teeming with hormones and sick with grief over
her missing child, Sarah struggled to get through each day.
She told her family she was off work because of the kidney
infection. As far as she knew, nobody noticed her altered
shape.
In reality, the secret was out. At Christmas, when Sarah
had been just over five months pregnant, a neighbour had
seen her and had her suspicions. Now, assessing her sagging
midriff and pasty pallor, the neighbour put two and two
together. Scandalized, she picked up the phone.
‘The neighbour calls my aunt in Dublin and the aunt
comes down,’ Sarah recalled. ‘I wasn’t there. I know that all
hell broke loose when she did come down. She and the
neighbour told my father, instead of coming directly to me.’

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‘Where were you at that point?’ I asked.
‘I can’t remember,’ Sarah said. ‘I honestly can’t remember.’
Sarah has never been able to fully reconstruct for me the
events immediately following her family’s discovery that she
had secretly given birth. There is, in her memory, no clear
moment of truth, of confrontation, of renunciation. What I
do know is that her father, devastated and shamed by his
daughter’s fall, would barely speak to her in the coming years
and decades. She had brought dishonour on the household,
she had stained the family name. Her relationship with her
family as she had known it was over.
Now that the baby was gone, she could no longer lodge
with Anne and Paddy. Although the medical certificate for
her fictitious kidney infection protected her teaching posi-
tion, she knew instinctively that she would never again set
foot in that town. She would have to start over. There were
more teaching jobs in Dublin than anywhere else, and the
city’s bustling anonymity seemed to suit her situation. But
she could not afford lodgings in Dublin. There was only one
person in Dublin with whom she could live rent-free: her
aunt. The same aunt who had just betrayed her.
Even allowing for the financial and familial circumstances, it
is hard to fathom how Sarah could have accepted the hospital-
ity of this woman. Was there an element of self-punishment
involved? Or perhaps just a sort of passivity that set in when,
seeking to avoid stigma and scandal, she surrendered her
autonomy and her baby?
In all the time I have known Sarah, she has never said any-
thing unkind about anyone – with the sole exception of this
aunt.
‘She was a witch. She was very, very cruel. She would say
anything.’
The aunt grudgingly told Sarah that she could remain at

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her house throughout the summer until she found a new job
and a place to live. In return, Sarah would have to live with
her aunt’s contempt, the disdain of the morally righteous for
the fallen woman.
‘Nobody will ever look at you again,’ the aunt told Sarah
one day. ‘You’re finished.’
‘I believed her,’ Sarah told me. ‘I did. I really did.’

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