The Light In The Window

by June Goulding

[wyvernfriend]

This is the story of about a year in the life of a midwife in Beesboro in Cork in Ireland in the 1950's. She's not a writer and sometimes it does wander off into reminisces, but it does read like she probably talks.

This is the story of a home for unmarried mothers, during her nine months there. The institutionalised cruelty that was practices by people who would then turn around and treat June so differently. It almost blew my mind how they seemed to think that this was right and normal.

I've read some review on Amazon where they ask how she could have stayed silent, not really knowing how powerful the Catholic Church was, how the complaints were easily and readily dismissed. There's a postscript in the edition I have that says that 20/20 ABC News New York did a documentary about it called the Lost Children of Ireland and the nuns still denied what she says! Proof is hard to come about.

Many of the children ended up in America with "good Catholic Families" and the truth about their past is obscured in a lack of leglislation. The women could pay to have the child taken away sooner rather than later but it was expensive so many of the women "paid" for their keep by three years of hard labour, becoming more and more institutionalised, where their families didn't want them to return because of the "shame" so many of them ended up spending the rest of their lives in various instutions.

It's harrowing and should be force fed to many who claim that Ireland was better in the past.