https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/people/arid-40855313.html?fbclid=IwAR3Ke79yqdMr9XJylM_CmvQT2nbOoor7PxazFCAwBEeOGCn7rSMUf7y2xLg'It’s a life sentence': Stories from the women of Bessborough mother and baby institution
Journalist Deirdre Finnerty knew little of Bessborough House until she first heard the harrowing story of one Irish woman in London
at, 23 Apr, 2022 - 06:00
Deirdre Finnerty
A couple of years ago, I had tea in a west London flat with a woman who didn’t want me to use her real name. The woman let’s call her ‘Bridget’ feared her friends and neighbours finding out about what she was about to tell me, a journalist. Although I assured her I would honour her wishes, I sensed she was nervous, her shoulders curling towards her ears as she opened the door. Bridget was in her 70s, smartly dressed with wavy, mid-blonde hair cut in a long bob. Her wide-set blue eyes were accentuated with green eyeshadow and despite over six decades in London, her accent hadn’t lost the traces of the Tipperary village in which she had grown up. After the tea was poured, and the soda bread slathered with butter, there wasn’t much small talk. Bridget told me about a time, many years ago, when she was 17, anxious and afraid. In a car driven by men she didn’t know, a pregnant Bridget had watched as a once-grand country mansion on the outskirts of Cork city had come into view. On that sunny day in August 1960, she had knocked on its red-painted oak door, believing she had no choice but to enter. The Bessborough mother and baby institution was run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The women and girls who passed through its doors had their children taken from them and placed for adoption, often without their consent. Once admitted, Bridget was given a faded blue uniform and spent her days cleaning, polishing and looking after babies that were not her own. And there were punishments, she told me, like the time she had to stand in the corner for hours while heavily pregnant. Her voice changed when she talked about her baby son William, about how she loved her tiny boy with neat blond hair “as if it was combed perfectly”. “He was a fighter, a good strong healthy baby”, she said.
But after three days, William grew weak and Bridget begged the nuns to send for a doctor. She recounted how it had taken a further 16 days for William to be sent to hospital and how he’d died less than three weeks after that. She wasn’t allowed to see him and she wasn’t told where he was buried. I drank many more cups of tea as I listened to what happened after she left Bessborough. She spoke of three suicide attempts, of a psychiatric hospital, and of decades of fruitless efforts to obtain information about where William was laid to rest. “It was complete loneliness”, she told me. I have come to the conclusion that I’ll be like this until I die, that I cannot get better, I’ll never be able to forgive them.”
Leaving the flat, I knew I would never forget the quiver of her voice, the vividness of her memories frozen in time. After that, I read what I could find about the Bessborough institution, shocked by how little I knew, how little I had been taught at school. I bought second-hand books, leafed through fragile, yellowed paper documents and scoured the important reporting that had been done by this newspaper. In operation between 1922 and 1998, Bessborough’s thick, brown-grey walls enclosed over seven decades of secrets. Hundreds of children like William lay in unknown burial places. And I heard many more stories like Bridget’s, in council flats, in country cottages and city townhouses. Like hers, they were stories of lives upended, of love for their children, of lasting trauma. Some still lived with a deep shame that corroded them inside and didn’t want to reveal their identities. But as weeks and months wore on, I came to meet three Bessborough women who told me their full stories who did not wish to hold anything back. Their vivid accounts took me right inside the walls of Bessborough House in the 1960s, 70s and 80s; through their eyes, we see the hastily packed cases in long dormitories; the pale walls of the downstairs delivery room; the nurseries filled with babies these women and girls would never take home. 74-year-old Joan McDermott was the first to sign up to this project. A tall, no-nonsense former nurse and social worker, she greeted me with a huge smile and freshly blow-dried blonde hair when I arrived at her home in Cork. Inside her spotless kitchen she passed slices of homemade rhubarb tart across the table; an effusive talker, she could speak uninterrupted for an hour at a stretch. But for 46 years she told no one about her experience of entering Bessborough as a teenage girl in 1967. “Emotionally, I withdrew into myself,” she said of that time, puffing occasionally on her purple vape pen. “I carried that all these years.”
When she tried to trace the son she lost to adoption, she encountered years of delays and difficulties. Coronavirus delayed my first meeting with 67-year-old north Dublin grandmother, Terri Harrison. Our conversations progressed from texts she sprinkled with pink heart emojis, to WhatsApp calls where she spoke at length about her experiences. Terri was forced back to Ireland from Britain in 1973, as part of a little-known repatriation scheme for pregnant Irish women. For decades after leaving Bessborough, she felt as though she lived her life in a bubble, mourning the son she wasn’t allowed to keep. “I was lost in this horrible void that never went away I did a lot of stuff in silence and nobody knew ...,” she told me.
Despite a spell of ill-health, the tiny, auburn-haired woman with a throaty laugh is an active campaigner. It’s her way of dealing with what she calls a “living bereavement”. “The best I can do is learn how to cope it never stops.”
By the 1980s, conditions were better and more women were deciding to keep their children but many still felt pressured into adoptions. Deirdre Wadding’s parents sent her to Bessborough in 1981; a cherished child from an aspirational family in County Wexford, she became pregnant as a student in Dublin. “I lost every sense of myself,” she recalled, remembering the “horrible, hurtful abusive things” said to her.
Even in the 80s, she didn’t feel she could challenge anyone about going to Bessborough. “We believed we couldn’t leave there,” she explained. “That was how society worked.”
Now in her 50s, with salt-and-pepper hair and a small silver nose stud, she is among the youngest surviving women to have given birth in a mother and baby institution. “It’s a life sentence,” she told me as she smoked a rollie by the front door of her rural cottage, her turquoise ring catching the autumn light.
As I got to know Joan, Terri and Deirdre, I learned what happened to them at Bessborough changed the course of their lives. All three spoke with incredible honesty of its impact on their relationships and mental health, of the many ways it affects them to this day. They wanted younger generations to learn from their experiences so it would never again happen to others and gave me permission to compile their stories into a book. Like Bridget’s, theirs too were stories of love for their children, stories of deep trauma. And like hers, they were stories of courage, the courage it takes to rebuild a life after loss.
