Missing Persons, My Grandmother’s Secrets Or
Clair Wills
‘Remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human’ SUNDAY TIMES
MISSING PERSONS
‘Not just a vivid, compelling account of Clair’s family and ancestry, but an intriguing snapshot of Ireland’s social history . . . rigorously researched . . . empathetic’ The Irish Independent
‘Compelling and deeply moving . . . an unforgettable account, in microcosm, of the world of Catholic Ireland in the twentieth century: the incarceration of the so-called sinful and the emigration of others, leaving a fragmented country of secrets, enigmas and buried guilt’ Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mail on Sunday
‘It combines scholarly rigour with memoir and a not inconsiderable amount of righteous anger to chronicle the silences and secrets that governed lives in twentieth-century Ireland . . . For keen readers of Irish memoir and autobiography, many of the details here will be completely familiar yet utterly shocking’ Ian Sansom, Literary Review
‘Brilliant and moving . . . fascinating . . . a riveting study of a “typical” twentieth-century Irish family, one both destroyed and bound together by its secrets . . . As it progresses, Missing Persons becomes less an effort to recover those missing relatives and more an inquiry into the mechanisms of disappearance, the ways that communities conspire to erase certain people from public life and collective memory’ Maggie Doherty, The Atlantic
‘Clair Wills has long been among the most supple and illuminating explorers of the intertwined cultural histories of Ireland and Britain . . . Missing Persons pulls on the threads of her own family’s stories and silences to unravel a dark history of loss and forgetting’
Fintan O’Toole, New York Review of Books
‘In its account of one family’s history of silence and secrecy, Clair Wills has written a compelling book which demonstrates the uncanny universality of even the most personal stories. Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present, this is a history shaken by intimacy – a brave and rigorously humane book’
Seán Hewitt
‘Moving and thoughtful’ Norma Clarke, TLS
‘Clair Wills retrieves from time’s abyss a speculative history of universal import. This is a penetrating and affecting study, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the profound contradictions, the secrets and lies that define post-famine Ireland’ Paul Lynch
‘The author’s prose is stellar; her cadence complements this compelling tale, which grew increasingly complex over years of meticulous research. Ultimately, she emphasizes that “everything I’ve been describing was not out of the ordinary”. Fascinatingly, viscerally haunting’ Kirkus Reviews
‘The stories she uncovers are remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human. At the heart is a missing cousin . . . powerful . . . insightful . . . so compelling . . . Her book, written with care, wit and vulnerability, shows that ordinary tragedies deserve our anger and attention’ Laura Hackett, Sunday Times
‘If the past is a mass of tangled wool, Clair Wills frees a long strand and knits it into clarity, line by line, inviting the reader to see the complexity of the pattern she reveals. Written with elegance and erudition, Missing Persons is an extraordinary, moving achievement’ Doireann Ní Ghríofa
‘Clair Wills has written a book of unusual subtlety and power. Part memoir and social history, part familial detective story, it’s a work that lays bare the strength and terrible frailty of the bonds that are supposed to bind us together. A superb work of narrative nonfiction’ Francisco Garcia
‘A deeply absorbing account, related with compassion in elegant prose, of how a family’s past becomes embedded in its present’ Danielle McLaughlin
‘This is a brilliant, poignant, discomforting book but one that has the beauty of honesty and the ultimate restorative kindness that truth-telling offers. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the complex typology and legacy of family secrets’ Katherine O’Donnell
‘In this powerful memoir, Wills manages to excavate the truth about silence. Her vision as a historian reaches for the central question, why and how Irish people kept such dark secrets. How a nation of storytellers became so good at keeping violence concealed from themselves. How the information was kept, manipulated, disremembered under layers of talk into a vast store of collective forgetting. This is not only the story of Ireland in the past, but who we all are and what we have become’ Hugo Hamilton
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clair Wills is a critic and cultural historian. She is the author of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, which won the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland During the Second World War, which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, Dublin 1916, The Best Are Leaving and, most recently, The Family Plot: Three Pieces on Containment. Wills is the regius professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge.
Clair Wills Missing Persons, or
My Grandmother’s Secrets
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First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2024
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Copyright © Clair Wills, 2024
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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 out ung arm say ‘lifeless’ as much as they say sleeping. Life, death – what’s the di erence? 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 great-uncles 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 great-uncles 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.
The Townlands
0 2 miles
0 2 km
Bantry
Ballydehob
Skibbereen
BALLYBANE WEST
CAPPAGH BEG
CAPPAGH MORE
DERREENARD
GLANNAKILLEENAGH
LISSYDONNELL
MORAHIN
LISHEENACREHIG
LISSACLARIG WEST
MORAHIN NORTH
MORAHIN SOUTH N71
CORRAVOLEY
COORANULLER
LISSACLARIG EAST
HOLLYHILL
KILCOE
AUGHADOWN