I grew up next to a cemetery where 35 girls were buried in an unmarked grave after a fire at St Joseph's Industrial School in Cavan Town in 1943. It was a mysterious thing to me as a child, that all those nameless girls should be squeezed into such a small plot. I knew only vague details about the fire - I knew that local townspeople had tried to save the girls but the nuns barred their entry, that the fire services were inadequate. But it wasn't until I read Children of the Poor Clares by Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey, first published in 1985, that I understood the extent of the girls' suffering.
In a public inquiry set up after the fire though the nuns were exonerated. It was clearly stated that, “If the existing means of escape were availed of properly under efficient leadership, no life need have been lost”. Those children had been detained like prisoners, and there they would have languished, and been forgotten about, if it hadn’t been for the fire that night in February 1943.
I was prone to melancholy, even as a child – mourning what was left behind, desperately longing for adulthood and the freedom I thought it would entail. Adolescence felt like a very lonely place sometimes, despite the proximity of a loving family (I am one of four children). I attended Loreto College in Cavan. My friends and I lived for the holidays, when our parents might let us out to a disco at the local boys’ school, or at a country club called The Carraig Springs, which we were bussed out to en masse from Cavan Town. The local lads used to park their tractors outside. An alternative life was lived in my small bedroom, where I surrounded myself with books and painted on my walls, writing poems and keeping a journal, dreaming with urgent intent of an alternative life.
I was in my late twenties and working as an editor at Oxford University Press when I started to write He Is Mine and I Have No Other. It's funny now to think of me then, revisiting a time in my life that I had so desperately wanted to push on from. I was living the life I had dreamed of (or some variation of it, at least) in Oxford, and yet there I was looking back. It started with the image of a boy walking past our house to the graveyard, to visit his mother's grave. I couldn't get it out of my mind. His name was Leon, and he was the boy that Lani, my 15-year-old protagonist, would fall in love with. He would offer her a portal into adulthood. So began her painful coming of age, amid the sweaty discos and furtive fumblings of 1990s Ireland.
As a teenager, I relished the idea of being at the centre of my own intense drama. So it was delicious to revisit that earlier version of myself and actually set her firmly at the eye of it all, bestowing on her some of the qualities I would have had at that age. Lani, like my teenage self, lives next to a cemetery where 35 girls are buried in an unmarked grave. And, like me, Lani feels cut off from the world, frustrated. It was all there in my journal - that and the intoxication of adolescent love, mostly unrequited.
The story of the orphans was meant to work as an undertow in the novel - a straight (albeit fictionalised) telling of what happened that night in the town, and of how Lani’s family was connected to it. But as time went on, and I drafted and redrafted the novel, the girls’ individual voices started to push through. They wrote themselves, like they wanted to be heard, and even though the voices were fictionalised, I felt like I was channelling some of their collective hurt.
Their voices tempered Lani’s, setting it in stark relief. Though her anguish is real, it pales when compared to what Leon has been through, and to what those girls endured.
The mystery of that nameless plot and the story of the fire stirred in me an abiding interest in the unspeakable things we allow to pass, the things we leave unsaid, the familial ties that bind us and can sometimes tear us asunder. Common motifs in Ireland, I suppose, but for good reason. The country I grew up in seemed like a very modern Ireland compared to the 1940s Ireland into which my parents were born. I was watching Absolutely Fabulous and addicted to Donkey Kong - and yet the last Magdalene Laundry only closed in 1996.
More than a decade after writing He Is Mine and I Have No Other, I find myself back in Cavan, standing before an infinity mirror of selves - the 40-something-year-old looking back at the 20-something-year-old writing about the 15-year-old coming of age in an Ireland that seemed modern, but which was only just on its way there, just as Lani was on her way to adulthood.
If anything, I feel more attuned to the voices of those girls now than I did a decade ago - partly because I have children of my own, but also because I can relate more to the suffering of those left behind, the parents and the siblings, and the generations of their families affected still. I am more acutely aware, too, of how privileged Lani was to have been able to grow up in a loving home.
It took 70 years for a plaque bearing the names of the 35 girls to be placed on their grave. Renewed efforts are being made now by local people to erect a permanent visible memorial. Time only tempers grief. It never fully goes. And it’s only with time that we come to fully appreciate that.
He Is Mine and I Have No Other by Rebecca O'Connor is published by Canongate, at £12.99
