Real lives: 'We were called "the unfortunates", but that's not how I viewed ... - Daily Mail
Standing outside the large wooden gates of the Regina Coeli hostel, I felt like a child again. The home for single mothers was where I spent the first nine years of my life. I was an illegitimate child, hidden from the judgmental world of 1950s Dublin in this secret sanctuary on the wrong side of town. I travelled to Dublin in late 2013 on a fact-finding mission to uncover the secrets of my childhood. More than 50 years on, I had an incredible urge to find out if the hostel still existed. Standing outside the forbidding three-storey grey-stone building, I knew I was opening a vault of memories that my mother had instructed me to keep firmly shut. In 1947, six years before I was born, my mother Cathleen was 29 years old, unmarried and becoming increasingly fearful that if she didn’t leave home soon her situation was never going to change. she just didn’t want to spend the rest of her days in Lucan on the outskirts of Dublin living a simple rural life exactly like her widowed mother before her. Her elder brother Christie had moved to Dublin some years before and encouraged Cathleen to take up a job as a hotel chambermaid in the city. Bill’s four sisters were resolute that a marriage would never work, as was Cathleen’s mother. After four years of clandestine. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
