9780241640951

Missing Persons, My Grandmother’s Secrets Or

Missing Persons

Missing Persons or, My Grandmother’s Secrets

ALLEN LANE

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First published 2024 001

Copyright © Clair Wills, 2024

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Lines from All that Fall and Eh Joe by Samuel Beckett are reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

Set in 12/14.75pt Dante MT Std Typeset by Jouve (UK ), Milton Keynes

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

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ISBN : 978–0–241–64095–1

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For Caroline

A friend has sent me a photograph, taken more than twenty years ago, of her baby asleep on her lap. It’s an outdoor scene – a shaft of light, a slab of granite, the varied greens of moss and grass, picnic paraphernalia. Her rumpled shirt suggests that her baby has fallen asleep after a feed. He lies back, abandoned to satisfaction, as she gazes into his face. It is a Madonna and Sleeping Child. But look, she says, he’s a little bit dead. And I can’t deny that the slumped head and outflung arm say ‘lifeless’ as much as they say sleeping. Life, death – what’s the difference? say the faces of the Madonnas. Their look speaks of their helplessness as much as of their love. They have given birth to loss, and they cannot now undo that fact.

Did you ever wish to kill a child? (Pause.) Nip some young doom in the bud . . .

Samuel Beckett, All That Fall (1957)

What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.

Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel (1987)

Cast of Characters

The Victorians

My grandmother Molly, born in 1891 in Cooranuller, near Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland. Died in 1980 a few miles from where she was born.

Molly’s brothers and sisters, Thomas, John, Ellen, Margaret, Jeremiah and Timothy, born between 1871 and 1882 in Cooranuller. All except Thomas and John emigrated to the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. My great­uncles and aunts.

My grandfather Thomas –  Tom –  born in 1877 in Ballybane West, near Ballydehob, County Cork. Died in 1946 a few miles away in Aughadown.

Thomas’s brothers and sisters, James, Jack, Stephen, Sarah, Robert and Mary Jane, born between 1862 and 1880 in various townlands near Skibbereen and Ballydehob, including Ballybane West. All except Stephen emigrated to the United States. More great­uncles and aunts.

The post-revolutionary generation

My uncle Jackie, first child of Molly and Thomas, born in Lissaclarig, near Skibbereen, in 1920. Died in Bury St Edmunds, England, 1972.

Cast of Characters

My mother Philly (Philomena), Jackie’s younger sister, born in Hollyhill, near Skibbereen, in 1930. She joined her older sister Mary doing mental health nursing training in England in the late 1940s. She met my English father, Bernard, at Netherne Mental Hospital, Coulsdon, south of London. They married in 1955 and she settled in England.

Jackie and Philly’s brothers and sisters, Mary 1 (died 1924), Mary 2, Stephen, Thomas, Jimmy, Peggy and Robert (died 1938), born between 1922 and 1936, in Hollyhill and Aughadown. Mary, Thomas and Jimmy all went to England.

Lily, born in 1936 near Aughadown. Died in 2018 in Staten Island, New York.

The post-war generation

Mary, daughter of Jackie and Lily, born 1955.

My sisters Siobhan, Bridget and Oona, and me, born between 1957 and 1965, in Coulsdon.

My eight cousins, children of my uncle Jimmy and Dot, and my aunt Peggy and Charles. Born between 1960 and 1976, in Skibbereen, Ireland, and in Nottingham, England.

The next generation

My children Jacob (1989), Luan (1993), Thaddeus (19–20 June 1996) and Philomena (1999). Born in England.

Their many cousins, born in England and Ireland, between the 1980s and the 2000s, to people who were married and people who were not.

Inheritances