Book review: Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets 

Clair Wills presents 'a history of unmarried motherhood through three generations of an Irish family, and the secrets we conceal'

Clair Wills raises uncomfortable truths in her latest book. Picture: Zahid Chaudhary

• Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets 
• Clair Wills 
• Allen Lane, €22.99

“Everywhere you look: hidden babies.’ The line, in Clair Wills’ new book Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets, is chilling, particularly at a time when so many await the exhumation of what remains of 796 babies buried in sewage tanks at the former mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway.

But, as Wills so ably illustrates, it is a statement that applies to so many Irish families across several generations, including hers.

Although born in England, she spent many happy childhood summers at her mother’s home farm in West Cork. 

Even though she was “a not-quite-fully-Irish person”, as she puts it, her sense of self was steeped in her experience of the townlands between Bantry, Ballydehob, and Skibbereen.

What follows is presented as “a history of unmarried motherhood through three generations of an Irish family, and the secrets we conceal”.

Clair Wills, the youngest of those three generations, never felt she had to conceal her own unmarried motherhood. 

In the England of 1989 that was happily the case, although it might not have been the same if her first son was born in Ireland. (The last Magdalene laundry closed in Dublin as late as 1996.)

She was in her 20s when she discovered there had been another pregnancy outside of marriage in the generation before hers. 

She had a cousin she didn’t know about, Mary, who had been living in an institution not far from the farm where she spent carefree holidays as a child. The first missing person.

She was shocked to discover that her pious grandmother Molly also had a secret. She walked down the aisle in a blue suit in 1920 and gave birth to a son Jackie just three months later. 

A large part of the book is spent trying to understand how this woman, given her own experience, reacted as she did when Jackie later fathered a child out of wedlock. 

Mother Lily and infant Mary were both cast out of the family circle.

Wills cannot reconcile the inherent contradictions in her grandmother’s actions, and mines family anecdotes and scant public records to try to explain them. 

The few nuggets she uncovers are revealed gradually. There is a sense that a mystery is unfolding, although we never get the full story.

There are several passages speculating on Molly’s pregnancy, but not enough weight is given to the possibility it might have been as a result of violence. 

That was a real possibility given the extent of sexual violence against women during the War of Independence.

Yet Wills judges her grandmother harshly, which seems unfair as she does not have all the facts. 

She is also very critical of her uncle’s decision to abandon Lily and Mary and emigrate, although her attempt to reconstruct his life as a labourer in England is very affecting.

As a cultural historian and critic, Clair Wills is particularly adept at weaving the social, cultural and historical context through her own family story. She focuses on the personal, then zooms out to the collective.

It is not entirely satisfactory, though, as she returns to the same stories again and again, but from a slightly different angle. 

It’s frustrating and repetitive, but perhaps that is the point she is trying to make. 

So many Irish people are affected by a culture of secrecy and are forced to assemble a history from scraps: stories with coded messages, information revealed in unguarded moments, and the sparse, inked details left behind in registers.

Having said that, Wills makes a point that is glaringly obvious, but so little voiced: perhaps the biggest Irish family secret is that its members were so rarely at home. 

They were parcelled out, voluntarily and involuntarily, to other countries, mother-and-baby homes and industrial schools or to institutions that taught them to become nuns, priests and brothers.

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets is not an easy read, but it does something very important. 

It acknowledges and attempts to address the decades — centuries even — of the just-below-the-surface trauma left behind by countless missing people.