It had languished in my bundle of books to read since last Christmas. Frankly, I kept putting off opening it, because I was afraid it would depress me too much. Finally, as summer came to a close, I opened the first page of Claire Keegan’s beautiful Small Things Like These and read it in one sitting.
Like many other readers, I imagine, I was so surprised that, despite the image of a skinny teenager cowering in a freezing convent coal shed in Co Wexford in the 1980s, a delicate tapestry of hope and humanity ultimately prevails.
The book also exhumed memories of my boarding-school days in the early 1970s and the sight of skinny teenagers curtsying to us privileged children in the medieval hallways of a one-time castle owned by Lord Essex.
I remember them toiling in a freezing cold laundry over big Belfast sinks with hands raw from carbolic soap and the demanding rhythms of washboards. They peeled the potatoes and turnips from the convent farm for our canteen dinners and shone the parquet floors, which served as skating rinks for gaggles of bold boarders – me included – during late-night mischief-making.
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Coincidentally, I read Claire Keegan’s book around the same time as a local woman here in Westport published her heartbreaking story of her secret teenage pregnancy, which culminated in the adoption of her baby boy after his birth, in May 1984.
Eithne Ring’s memoir, Does My Son Take Sugar? An Irish Mother’s Memoir, has resonated widely here in the west of Ireland. It has already been reprinted a number of times. The irony underpinning this story is that she ultimately married the father of her baby boy, Joe Ring, with whom she also had their “amazing triplets” in September 1997.
Like most relationships, their story was a complicated one, compounded by her “scandalous” pregnancy, its cover-up and the utter shame it had incurred. Like so many others during those times, she was spirited away to a host family, in this case in Limerick, through a Catholic crisis-pregnancy agency.
This is how she describes the subterfuge.
“The story about me leaving Westport was concocted: I was “off to France” to work as an au pair in Lyon for six months ... To back up this story, I was to write letters to my friends, give them to the nun I was dealing with in Limerick, and she in turn would send them on to a nun in France who would post them back to my friends in Ireland.”
The loneliness and anxieties of the next months were made bearable by the kindnesses of a small number of people, particularly a GP, called Dr Aileen in the book (to protect her real identity).
One of her kind gestures was the replication of the gift of a Pierrot clown, called Buffy, which was Eithne’s first present for her baby.
“He has never left my bed. Trouserless and now looking 100 years old, that toy has simply been cuddled to death.”
Like many first births, this young woman, who had turned 20 during the pregnancy, was totally traumatised. She recalls how she believed she deserved all the pain, the vaginal tears, stitches in her torn body: “the just deserts” meted out for her crime. She was “a bold” girl and thus did not deserve any back rubs, warmth or empathy during her labour.
“Nobody handed me my baby to hold, nobody asked if I wanted to hold my son; he was taken away and I cannot even recall the first time I got to see, never mind hold, my baby.”
Meanwhile, the entire operation seemed like a seamless one for the nuns. They just spirited him away, along with the little white booties and cardigans his distraught mammy had knitted for him. All she had to do was pack her bags, be collected by a relative and return to Westport, to her life and job as a receptionist in a GP practice, as if nothing had happened.
Unsurprisingly, though, the yearning for her baby boy never receded. Each May 29th, Neil’s birthday, she writes that her “womb regrew with emotions”. He represented “the Irish Catholic elephant in the room” in a town that had not grown yet into the cosmopolitan conurbation that it is these days. Other than “one thoughtful lady who called on that day for years”, as most of her family “ignored the birthday, not out of badness of course, just from a what-we-don’t-mention-will-go-away approach”.
Eithne Ring’s story ultimately has a happy ending. On August 18th, 2008, her eldest son, Neilie, knocked on her front door and she could finally ask him, then aged 24, did he take sugar?
It is no wonder that, like so many young mothers who were forced into such inhumane and hypocritical decisions, she passionately welcomes the establishment of the Birth Information and Tracing Act 2022. Importantly, its provisions include Contact Preference Register with Information and Tracing Services due to open in October. (see birthinfo.ie).