Evelyn Doyle was put into 'care' after her mother ran off in 1953 - and her father had to go to the Supreme Court to get his children back. She tells Kathryn Holmquist how her life story became a film and a book.
Please God, not another MIM! That's what US publishers were saying when their e-mails started buzzing with the news that the latest Miserable Irish Memoir was going to a bidding war. Then they read Evelyn: A True Story , had a laugh and a cry, and before you could say "boiled cabbage", "nuns" and "Fatima Mansions", Evelyn Doyle had got a six-figure advance from US publisher Simon & Schuster for her first book - which she had written in 10 weeks. Even the Chinese have bitten. And the sequel has secured an even larger advance.
"I've been stunned by the interest in the book," says Doyle (56), who wanted to write an upbeat story rather than another Angela's Ashes (no offence to Frank McCourt). She describes herself as having "a hard exterior but soft underneath".
It strikes you that this is not unlike the nuns who cared for her in St Joseph's, Drumcondra, as a child. Doyle loves people and as a police officer in Scotland, was a soft touch for any shoplifter who cried. When her ex-husband left her, she helped him to move to his new apartment and made sure he knew where his clean socks were. Every time she reads James Plunkett's Strumpet City she wants to "save Rashers".
A loyal Maeve Binchy reader, Doyle has a life that would be worthy of a Binchy novel. As a seven-year-old in 1956, Evelyn became the subject of one of the most important Supreme Court cases in Irish history. Add to that the tantalising information that she has lived for the past 15 years with a policeman 15 years her junior, plus her interesting career path as a weaver, a psychiatric nurse, a policewoman and the owner of a dessert manufacturing company. Doyle has a 25-year-old son Benjamin, a blues musician and composer, whose music provides the mood on the CD of Doyle's book, as well as on the latest Maeve Binchy "talking book".
Benjamin rings as we sit in Doyle's room in the Shelbourne Hotel, wanting to know if his mother has arrived safely in Dublin. "As a mother, I was harsh," Doyle confesses. "I would have been better off having a Labrador."
It's hard to believe that Doyle was ever that "harsh", although her childhood certainly was. Her father, Dessie Doyle, became a hero for fathers in 1955 when he battled the Government for custody of his children. Evelyn was just seven when, on St Stephen's Day in 1953, her mother ran off with her father's cousin, leaving her and her five younger brothers at the mercy of neighbours in Fatima Mansions.
Dessie - then aged only 28 - was so angry that he refused to let his children have anything to do with their maternal grandmother, in Longford Terrace, Dún Laoghaire, although she wanted to care for the children.
Unemployed and unable to work without being able to pay someone to care for his children, Dessie threw his children on the mercy of the ISPCC, who placed the children in industrial schools. Dessie naively took the family court justice's word at face value when he said: "don't leave them there too long".
An accomplished musician who made his living as a painter and decorator, he went to England to earn enough money to set up a home in Dublin for his children. But when he returned in 1955, with a Protestant "housekeeper", Jessie, the State refused to give his children back to him until they reached age 16.
"My father had no idea this would happen, or he would never have given us up. Nothing in this world could have made him hand us over until we were 16," says Evelyn Doyle.
Over the next year, Dessie waged a groundbreaking and highly publicised court battle against the government. In the Supreme Court, the Children's Act of 1941 was overturned and in 1956 Dessie was allowed to bring his children home. The family - and particularly Evelyn - became so well-known that Dessie decided to emigrate to Scotland with his children. What happened next? It wasn't a fairy tale, but if you want to know more you'll have to wait for the sequel.
Doyle knew that her story was the stuff of drama and wrote a 30-page synopsis, which she gave to a friend in the BBC.
One night, while she was watching her favourite programme, Star Trek Voyager, Doyle got a call from someone calling himself Pierce Brosnan and nearly hung up on him, assuming it was a hoax call. Brosnan visited Doyle for dinner at her home in Scotland and convinced her that his portrayal of her beloved father, who died from asbestos-related lung cancer in 1986 at the age of 62, would not show him as a saint, but as the man he really was. "As handsome as a film star, but volatile, with a trigger temper," says Doyle.
Once the film, which features Brosnan and Julianne Margolis, was underway, it was time for Doyle to sit down and write the book. Certain passages were more difficult than others. Doyle says her motivation was not revenge on her "Mammy", who she has no desire for a relationship with.
As a teenager, Doyle tracked her mother down. Mammy's first words were: "Let's catch up on all the gossip. Do you smoke?" Her mother, Doyle is certain, will read the book but she wants her to have her privacy and dignity.
Doyle doesn't believe in hanging on to pain. "Emotional baggage is useless and destructive. My advice to anyone is get a life and move on," she says.
Yet, she knows just as well, that some pain never dissipates. She still weeps, in her luxurious Shelbourne room, when she recalls the despairing expressions on the faces of her four younger brothers, two of them toddlers, as they were driven away in a black car to nuns in Kilkenny. The fifth boy, the "baby", was already in hospital having been nearly burned to death in his pram - an incident that Doyle still recalls as the worst day in her life. She felt responsible.
By the age of seven, Doyle had already become a mother to her younger brothers in Fatima Mansions, where they tore the lino off the floor to make fires and warm themselves. With their mother disappearing sporadically, and their father working down the country, the children survived thanks to the compassion of a neighbour in Fatima Mansions, "Mrs Sullivan" in the book.
When the children were eventually dragged crying away from Fatima Mansions by the authorities, all they wanted was their "Mammy" who had abandoned them. As a policewoman in Scotland many years later, Doyle was often given the duty of taking children away from abusive or neglectful parents. "My colleagues used to say, 'Why are they crying?'. But I knew why," says Doyle. "No matter how badly treated you have been by your parents, you still love them."
Doyle now believes that she survived abandonment in St Joseph's only because she knew she was loved, not only by her father, but also by her maternal grandmother - who secretly visited her - and her paternal grandfather, Henry Doyle. Henry also known as Harry, was an eccentric musician who played violin in the Gate Theatre for 30 years. If anyone knows what happened to Henry Doyle, or even where he is buried, Evelyn Doyle would love to hear from them.
Doyle knows that some children in industrial schools suffered "unbelievable abuse", but she has only praise for the nuns at St Joseph's who, she remembers, "fluttered around like little black butterflies". When she returned to the convent 10 years ago, Mother Aloysius answered the door with the greeting, "Evelyn darling, hello", and treated her like a long-lost daughter.
When Doyle left the convent in 1956, she had mixed feelings.
The nuns had given her security, if not love and cuddles, and Evelyn was fearful about the future that faced her with her father, however much she loved him. As a symbol, she left behind her doll, "Molly" at St Joseph's.
"I know now that some people say that they had ill treatment from nuns," says Doyle, who got her share of the strap across the legs. "A woman on the Internet, in response to my story, said that Sister whoever at St Joseph's had washed her mouth out with soap and water, and paddled her for misbehaviour, but you have to remember that in those days many parents would have done the same. Everyone knew in those days what was going on in convents - why else would my father have been so anxious to get us out of there? But if I have upset people, I'm sorry."
Evelyn: A True Story by Evelyn Doyle is published by Orion (£12.99 sterling). The film will be released early next year