My favorite books about mother and baby homes and the unplanned babies that arrived

I came across this memoir while researching Irish mother and baby homes for my own novel. June Goulding was a young midwife in the 1950s when she was hired by the Sacred Heart Convent in Cork.  Here she found girls,  some as young as 13, punished for the sin of being pregnant, forced to work, tarring roads, scrubbing floors, and rearing their children until they were handed over for adoption – in exchange for a donation to the church – often without their consent. Thirty years later, haunted by what she was party to, Goulding tells the story of how she tried to relieve the suffering of these unfortunate women. 

I was so struck by this candid memoir from Angela Patrick about what happened to her when she became pregnant in the early sixties at nineteen that it made me consider my mother’s lucky escape when the same thing happened to her. Both were Catholic and unmarried, but Patrick, unlike my mother, turned to her family for help and was exiled to a mother and baby home. It’s a tale of shame and sorrow, coldness and cruelty – and the scars that remain when a baby is given up.

An exquisite, elegantly written book, I was moved by this story of a man whose illegitimacy was overlooked by his mother’s employer, allowing him to flourish and go on to have a thriving family of his own. Now it’s the night before Christmas and as the town prepares for the celebrations, he becomes aware that there are girls, hidden in plain sight, enduring agonies for the very ‘sin’ of which his own mother was ‘guilty.’ This is a book about community and our own individual responsibility. I read it only after I’d finished my own book on a similar subject and was inspired by its power and the lightness of its touch.   

I listened to this book on Audible and was utterly captivated by the force and humour of the story. It’s written in a bravura style and starts with yet another pregnant teenage girl being denounced – this time by her priest, who strikes and kicks her and expels her from the parish. (We later learn he has fathered two children himself, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty.) But this is a story of survival and for the most part follows the life of her son, Cyril, and how he attempts to find his place in a country that refuses to accept there is such a thing as homosexuality. It’s funny, moving, and with a breadth of ambition that left me reeling. I particularly loved how, decades later, it shows how fundamentally Ireland has changed. 

I first read The Millstone as a teenager and was surprised by it, as I imagined the baby – illegitimate, unplanned – was the millstone of the title. But the book is in fact a pean to motherhood, how it sharpens and enriches life, how love, unimagined, can burst up and bring joy. I re-read this book as part of my recent research – and found it wittier, cleverer and more poignant than I’d remembered. A true feminist classic of its time, and ours.