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When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she found out that she had a cousin neither she, nor anyone else in her family, had ever met. Mary — the first and most prominent of the “missing persons” in this enthralling family memoir — was born in a Mother and Baby home in Ireland in the 1950s. Mary’s father was the author’s uncle Jackie (her mother’s brother), who had got a local girl named Lily pregnant.
The couple — if their entanglement was ever official enough to warrant the label; Wills can’t determine the specifics — didn’t get married. Lily, like so many other girls across the country both before and after her, was bundled off with her shame, out of sight and out of mind. While Jackie, carrying his own ignominy, slipped away to England where he was swallowed up among the large numbers of fellow countrymen making an off-the-record, rough-and-ready living as itinerant labourers: another missing person in Wills’s family story.
“My debts go a long way back,” writes Wills in the book’s acknowledgments, thanking those who’ve encouraged her to tell this story since the 1990s. The memoir’s 30-odd-year gestation is significant. During this time Wills — currently regius professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge and the author of prizewinning works on Ireland, including The Best Are Leaving (2015) and That Neutral Island (2007) — has established herself as a leading cultural critic and historian. This expertise provides the context within which the personal story of Missing Persons rests, fortifying it with superb effect.
Much of Ireland’s recent history is here, from the horrors of famine, through the violence of the war of independence, to the loneliness of the Irish labourers in England in the 1960s. Yet, Wills navigates it nimbly, never letting the players in her own family history disappear “under the weight of an established set of stories”. Nor is Missing Persons just another tale of the horrors of the Mother and Baby homes. All the years spent meticulously interpreting visible historical material hasn’t told Wills why her family members behaved as they did. This is the question that has absorbed her since she found out about Mary’s existence.
Most opaque of all is the apathy of her maternal grandmother Molly. How could Molly — a woman who, Wills discovers, had fallen pregnant out of wedlock herself, with the very son (Jackie) who then inflicted the same shame on Lily — justify abandoning this poor girl to the exact fate she had narrowly escaped 34 years earlier? Molly married Jackie’s father only three months before Jackie was born. “Six months is a very long time to wait, not knowing what you are going to do about the baby growing inside you,” Wills reminds us, especially in a small community in West Cork in 1920.
By paying close attention to the stories her mother told her over the years Wills situates herself within a complex network of female secret-sharing that began as a graspable form of empowerment in a world in which women had little autonomy. Wills notices how her mother sets up stories as if they’re fairy tales before delivering their matter-of-fact endings. She interprets this as the battle between the pull of her mother’s traditional rural ancestry and the rational world she has built her life in; it also turns these kernels of history into something otherworldly.
This capacity for concealment and disassociation was ripe for exploitation: silences became “dangerous” once they acquired “institutional backing” in the form of the homes. Whole communities became complicit in this state-sanctioned control — not talking about what happened in these places, refusing to see the abuse and the violence.
Missing Persons is as close to perfect as a memoir can be; the richness of its subject honed to a poised and discerning brevity, written in unexpectedly lambent prose. It is the sum of the author’s life: both the family history she carries with and within her, but also the four decades of research and analysis that have been her intellectual existence. Only she could have written it, but it will speak to and about the lives of many.
Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills Allen Lane, £20, 208 pages
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