My Mother's Children: An Irish family secret and the scars it left behind. Annette Sills (free e books to read online txt) 📖

Mayo Man Snaps Up Top London Theatre Prize

Timothy Dempsey, a native of County Mayo, has been named Best Director in the Off West End Theatre awards. His adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars played at the Southwark Playhouse earlier this year. The Guardian described it as ‘Harrowingly brilliant’ and The Times said it was ‘One of the finest pieces of theatre you’ll see in London this year”.

Dempsey, who left Mayo for London in 1965, told the Mayo News he was ‘humbled and delighted’ at his win.

Demspey has worked as a lecturer, playwright and theatre director for over fifty years and lives in Battersea with his partner. He has one son.

Timothy Dempsey. In all my Google searches for Tess’s brother I’d looked for Tadhg Dempsey. Tadhg must be the Irish for Timothy. I picked up my iPad from the top of the bedside table and checked. Turned out it wasn’t a proper translation, but a lot of people thought it was. I didn’t know any of that. Maybe I wasn’t as Irish as I thought. So Tess had lied when she told Mikey and me that her brother had ended up living on the streets in Kilburn. Had she done it so we would never try and trace him? So she’d never have to face him again after what he’d done all those years ago?

I looked at the photograph again. My uncle looked shy and retiring and seemed to shrink from the camera like a hermit crab. He seemed nothing like the cruel brother I’d imagined who’d handed over his pregnant fifteen-year-old sister to the nuns to placate his parents and his rich Protestant friends. I took in the elegant tux and the highbrow theatre setting and sighed. Tess’s life trajectory after she came out of the home was one of poverty, mental-health problems and loneliness. Yet his seemed to have been full of wealth, glamour and fame. I resented that. Yet part of me felt emotional. Here was my uncle, the only living breathing member of Tess’s side of the family, someone I’d never met. Despite what he’d done in the past I couldn’t help feeling an excitement and a connection. He obviously loved literature and the arts like I did and he looked so much like Mikey it hurt.

I googled his name, the right one this time, and I was impressed by what I found. The list of links to theatre productions went back years and he had worked all over the UK. Synge, Behan and O’Casey were there as well as Chekhov, Ibsen, O’Neill and some contemporary stuff. He’d also written a number of reviews and articles and was currently directing a Martin McDonagh play due to open at Battersea Arts Centre in a few weeks’ time. I found no social media accounts which didn’t surprise me as he was a little old to belong to the Facebook generation. However, I did find the contact details of his theatrical agent in Notting Hill Gate.

I thought again about Kathleen Slevin seeing the two men take my brother away from the Mother and Baby Home in the open-top sports car. Instinct had always told me Tess’s brother was one of them. I remembered how Julia said that Tess told Dad that her brother was more attached to the Protestant family in the lodge than his own. The question was, did Timothy Dempsey know where my brother was now?

I put Julia’s letter and the article back into the envelope and slipped it into the drawer of the bedside cabinet. Then I picked up my iPad again and found the contact details of Dempsey’s theatrical agent. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I was well enough to get back on that emotional roller-coaster search for my brother again. Then I thought of the promise I’d made to Tess and about everything she had gone through. I couldn’t let her down. I made a screenshot then sent it to my phone.

Chapter 32

London was locked in a blood-slowing cold. The TV screen in the hotel bar said temperatures would plummet to minus two and snow was expected by late evening. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the half-empty bars and restaurants along the Southbank and a thin layer of frost shimmered on the ground. The Thames was the colour of a shiny green olive and the dome of St Paul’s was blue-white against the black night sky.

I glanced at my watch. Ten to six. The play started at seven thirty. It would take a good hour to walk to the theatre in Battersea but walking was what you did in London, whatever the weather. I pulled my cowl scarf up around my face. I regretted wearing my new red Hobbs coat. I’d chosen it to make an impression but it was too thin and the cold stabbed right through it. Some of the performers along the bank were turning in for the night. Yoda was climbing out of his flimsy lime-green Jedi dress and reaching for his Puffa jacket, and an African steel band in earmuffs and gloves were handing round a bobble hat for cash and packing up. I dropped a pound coin in the cap of a homeless man sitting in a doorway, hidden in a hijab of scarves.

The day after receiving the article about Timothy Dempsey I’d sent an email to his agent in Notting Hill explaining who I was. I said I wanted to touch base after Tess’s death and included my contact details. I mentioned nothing about trying to trace my brother. Three weeks on, after two further emails and a message on the agent’s answer machine, I’d had no reply. If I needed any further proof that my uncle knew something about Donal’s whereabouts this was it. Angry at his stonewalling, I decided to take matters in my own hands.

I kept up a brisk pace down