The Camera

Art by Iris Bowdler.

“I think of history as a long line of bodies.” Clair Wills’ memoir Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets opens with an image of the past that is neat and familiar – “a bit like those evolutionary diagrams of apes standing straighter” – with one essential difference: “my figures are all women, heavy with child.” These women represent the genealogical line of Wills’ Irish mother, which provides the basis of her history. She deftly weaves the familial with the national, locating each female generation in the shifting social contexts of Ireland since the late Victorian era. But Wills’ long line of bodies works metaphorically, too. It symbolises the chain of secrets that bound women together and tore them apart, in an Ireland where illegitimacy was insistently and institutionally concealed.

We speak to Wills a few weeks after her memoir’s publication. Currently the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, she has written several books on the cultural history of Ireland (That Neutral Island, Lovers and Strangers). But Missing Persons is undoubtedly a more intimate turn. “The book is a memoir of my relationship with my mother,” Wills tells us. “And an attempt to understand a past through stories that are incomplete.” 

When Wills was in her twenties, she found out she had a cousin, a secret known to some of her family and kept from others. Mary, born in 1955, was the child of Jackie (her mother’s brother) and a local girl, Lily. The nature of the couple’s relationship is unclear, and unimportant, perhaps, because in the end what mattered is that they did not marry. Jackie left for England, dissolving into the exodus of Irish labourers emigrating in the mid-20th century; he never returned. Lily was sent to Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork, and Mary brought up in an orphanage just 25 miles from where Wills and her sisters spent their childhood summers at their grandmother Molly’s home.

Mother and baby homes were institutions where unmarried pregnant women and girls like Lily could have their babies. Similar institutions existed in the United States, Britain, and other European countries; none so late as Ireland, where the last home closed in 1998. Funded by the state and run by the religious orders, Wills points out “they weren’t so much secret as in the business of secrecy.” A government investigation into the institutions began in 2015, prompted by the discovery of the bodies of 800 babies and small children in a disused septic tank of a former mother and baby home in Tuam, Galway. At Bessborough, more than 900 children died; its infant mortality rate was five times the national average in 1950. 

The shame of this story is difficult to absorb as a reader; it is hard to imagine how difficult it must have been to write. The discovery of Lily’s pregnancy came as Wills “had just given birth to my own first baby.” The difference in consequences of their pregnancies could not be starker (Wills, unlike Lily, “did not doubt that [she] had a future”). But, as Wills writes in the memoir, the distance between us and the people who believed in the systems that Lily and Mary were subject to is marginal: “sometimes there is no distance at all.”

When the final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation was published in 2020, Wills wrote in the London Review of Books that “the institutionalisation of Irish life robbed people of much of their autonomy and rendered many of them powerless. But it didn’t absolve them of responsibility.” We speak to Wills a few days after the launch event for Missing Persons at the Irish Embassy in London, where the ambassador, Martin Fraser, declared there is an “obligation from everyone in Ireland” to acknowledge these stories. “My question was,” Wills explains, “is there another way of acknowledging this history, of making sense of this history, which would allow us to recognise that we are all answerable to it?” This “making sense” – an earlier proposed title for the memoir was ‘Making Sense of the Missing’ – is reparative. “I’d like to think that there is a different way of understanding the past and particularly why women do what they do.” 

But how can you make sense of missing subjects and missing records? Though Wills does use institutional documents, traditional archival evidence is insufficient when facing systematic negligence on this scale: “The past has not been forgotten so much as disremembered, indeed dismembered”. Wills suspects that had she attempted to probe the homes’ records a couple of years later, in the wake of public outcry, she would have met with even greater barriers.

In response to these “blind spots” of the records, Wills instead turns to stories as her historical method. “We are our own archives,” she resolves. She uses her mother’s recollections of shopkeepers’ gossip and hinted secrets, and imagines the wider circumstances of a birth certificate dated merely three months after a marriage certificate, the only proof of her grandmother’s premarital pregnancy. This methodology – of history as story, and story as history – seems the only way of navigating and voicing a realm of secrecy, shame, and silence.

Wills tells us that she and her sisters “were learning to read complex texts right from when we were children”. She laughs this off as “rather pat and ridiculous”, but it carries a certain truth. Tellingly, at the memoir’s launch, Wills began with a reading about her mother’s stories, and how she “turned her past into a fairy tale”: “She wants to protect the past from the prying eyes of the present, and the future. And she wants to neutralize its violence.” For Wills, though, stories offer another purpose. Rather than concealing violence, they can address, negotiate, and reveal it. And despite this inclination towards the fairytale, her mother’s role in opening up these previously secret stories is key. As Wills explains to us, “my mother is the hinge here”: “she’d seen stories being used to deflect, but she’s telling me them partly because she wants to open them out.”

Though most of the memoir’s stories are about women, Wills takes a moving turn in its final act, to dwell on Jackie and the missing men of this national scandal. She remembers recording the audiobook, and says she found herself tearful when she reached that chapter. “It’s so embarrassing! I think what was going on there was that I was reaching into my mother’s sadness about the loss of her brothers. You know, she lost contact with them, and I think she felt terrible guilt and shame and sorrow.” 

Wills writes that her uncle “was always off somewhere, at the edge of things.” The memoir notes the structures that made it easy for Irish men to disappear: the cheap ferry ticket, the itinerant lifestyle on arrival, the ordered notebooks of false names kept tucked away for tax inspections. These men were able to live “their lives in the negative.” Wills strikingly labels Jackie as an “undocumented migrant” – another ‘missing person’ in this story, but one that is ultimately the subject of another project, or a different sort of memoir. When asked where and what the role of the men’s stories is in the conversation, Wills pauses. “We’re not going to be able to think fully about this history,” she says, “unless we include the men.” Four years on from the Commission, how these stories will emerge, take form, and give voice to this history can only be speculated.

If the tone of the memoir at times feels doubting or unsure, Wills tells us this is deliberate. “This is not a book with conclusions. I had no desire to come up with an ‘answer’.” Half-Irish and herself largely missing from the family home in Cork, she is self-conscious of her own perceived “illegitimacy” – a pointedly chosen word – in telling this story. It was only when the Commission’s report was published that this feeling of illegitimacy was reframed. “My relationship to that history as someone who was outside it and from whom it had been kept secret wasn’t just because I was in England,” Wills says. “It was because that was everybody’s relationship to it.”

The Irish Government’s €800 million reparations scheme for victims of mother and baby homes begins to come into effect this year. As we finish our conversation, we ask Wills where she sees Missing Persons sitting in this wider context. She takes a moment to think. Writing the book became a way for her to make sense of the secrets kept in her own family, realising that those secrets were typical, not unique. At the end of the day, “we’re talking about people loving and having sex. And we don’t think of that as shameful any more. There’s a part of me that kept on thinking, why would this still be difficult to talk about? It shouldn’t be at some level. And yet, yes, it is.”

Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills is published by Allen Lane, released January 2024.

By Elizabeth Murphy & Rachel Rees