Testimony of: Samantha Long (daughter of deceased Magdalene)
Given: 7th May 2012
Interviewer: Claire McGettrick
Name of relative: Margaret Bullen
Institution: Gloucester Street/Sean McDermott Street
Date of entry: Exact date unknown until records obtained, estimated at sometime around 1967
Date of departure: Never released. Margaret died while still in the charge of the Sisters of our Lady of Charity of Refuge in 2003.
Age on entry: 16 years (approx)
Interviewee Initials – SL
Interviewer Initials – CMcG
Introduction
CMcG: Please give your full name.
SL: My name is Samantha Long
CMcG: Consent to participate: Before starting the interview, I would like to ask you to confirm that you agree to participate in this interview voluntarily and that you are familiar with the consent forms that I previously provided to you.
SL: Yes I confirm that.
Early Life - Childhood Recollections
CMcG: When and where were you born?
SL: Myself and my twin sister were born in St. Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home on the Navan Road in Dublin 7 on the 5th of March 1972.
CMcG: Did you hear about Magdalene Institutions when you were younger?
SL: No, we knew that we were adopted and we didn’t know the circumstances of our birth mother until much later in our lives and the only time I ever heard the word Magdalene was from the Bible.
CMcG: So, who raised you, you were adopted?
SL: Yes, we were adopted by a wonderful working class couple called Eamon and Anne Thornton, who were married in Dublin in 1968. Anne was from Drimnagh and Eamon from Crumlin and they were trying to have a family for a couple of years after their marriage and that wasn’t working out. So, they, I think reluctantly, applied for adoption and Mum wanted to have a brand new baby, probably about a few days old, a baby that she could mould and make her own. When they went through the adoption process, and the vetting and so on, they were invited by the nuns at the St. Louise Adoption Society to meet twins and the twins were almost nine months old and that was myself and my sister, Henrietta. They’re our adopted names by the way.
So Mum was, Mum wasn’t really interested in taking on two nine month olds, because she just was going to be a first time mother and she was frightened of the whole process! My sister was very frightened of men and she was very frightened of anybody with glasses so I think when we met Mum and Dad originally, we, it was in a big room in a convent, or maybe it was still in a Mother and Baby Home, I’m not sure, my adoptive Mum is dead now so I don’t get all the details all the time from Dad because he wouldn’t remember them as well as she would. So, Dad convinced Mum to meet these little twin girls, because he had a feeling that it was going to be good and Mum didn’t want to go there but she did and when the nuns brought in the twins, myself and my sister, who were actually, we were then called Theresa and Bernadette, we weren’t called Samantha and Henrietta until later. My sister Etta, who was very frightened of men, put her arms outstretched to my father, to my adoptive Dad, Eamon and that was the first time she had ever embraced a man. And my Dad thinks that she was somehow mistreated by a man in the orphanage or maybe just shouted at or something like that, but for months after that and even following our adoption, she couldn’t look at any other man except my Dad and she couldn’t deal with anybody who had glasses on. And that was even her adoptive grandparents, she couldn’t look at them if they had their glasses on, unfortunately, and that all, that all came right.
So the day they met us I think we were, I think I said about seven months old when they first met us, and Dad has great memories of sliding us down this long polished table in the convent where we were staying! It was one of those long dining room tables that were very common in those places and just for fun they were sliding us down the table and he just, he remembers us giggling and thinking that we hadn’t giggled much before that. And we hadn’t reached any of the milestones that kids are supposed to reach at that age and we were, we were absolutely destroyed with nappy rash and we had, you know, crusty noses and all that kind of thing, they didn’t really clean us up very well, to meet them.
So, they, they just wanted to rescue us, and that’s what they did. And we were brought home on the 2nd of December, 1972 and Mum gave up her job in the sewing factory on Friday night and on Saturday morning she was a mother to two children. And that Christmas was very special because Christmas was three weeks after we were adopted and like, they didn’t have much money or anything, Dad was a pipe fitter at the time and later became a cabinet maker and was very successful at that. But, Dad just went out and bought two of everything, everything that we didn’t even need, so he bought two bikes, even though we couldn’t even creep yet, he bought a Wendy House, two sort of walker things - they used to have kids in walkers back then – and just two of everything he could find. And there’s pictures of them in their little, their little council house which is absolutely just full of toys, toys that we were too young to play with, but he didn’t have the experience to know what we’d need, he just bought everything anyway! So, forty years later, my Dad just has one date in his mind when he talks about the happiest day of his life and that was the 2nd of December 1972.
CMcG: Wow, incredible.
SL: Yes, we were very lucky.
CMcG: And you were in St. Pat’s on the Navan Road, yes?
SL: Yes.
CMcG: Do you know if your natural mother was with you at that time, for any length of time?
SL: She was only with us for the first seven weeks of our lives, she was breastfeeding us and, but during that time she wasn’t off the way you would be on maternity leave now, for six months with your paid time off. She was back to scrubbing, back to scrub the laundry and she used to see us I think, morning and evening and breastfeed us at those times and I think we were supplemented with bottles during the day while she was working –
CMcG: In St. Pat’s?
SL: I think so, we’re not sure about that part. We think we were in the Mother and Baby Home all that time with her and, but obviously even when you went to the Mother and Baby Home you had to still keep earning your keep and keep working, so the babies were, we were in a cot together, which was nice. I’d say it was nice anyway and one evening, she came up to feed us and we were gone, we were just gone. But she didn’t know that we were going to be going –
CMcG: And that would have been the December?
SL: No, this was only after the seven weeks, we were born on the 5th of March, so sometime in late April we were just gone –
CMcG: And they didn’t let her see you anymore?
SL: No. Then we, then the next time that she saw us, we were twenty-three.
CMcG: So, is it your sense, or do you know, at that seven weeks, she was moved from St. Pat’s herself or -
SL: Yes, I think that she went back to Gloucester Street. Because of what I think was post-traumatic stress, Margaret didn’t remember all of this stuff. And, drip-feeding her the questions when we met her at that age, twenty-three - and knew her until she died – we had to very gently prod some of those things and some of it was very painful and, for her, in fact when we first met her, she forgot that she had twins, she didn’t remember that she had twins, or any children. She had another little girl after us, four years later, who is also adopted and who we have never met or been able to trace. So, before we met her and when the social worker, when the social worker was tentatively talking to the nuns about the possibility of a reunion, she didn’t remember that she had babies and then, volunteers used to come into Gloucester Street laundry where she lived and they used to do their hair, give them a haircut or wash and blow-dry for a kind of a treat, some volunteers did that, and while she was getting her hair blow dried, she looked at herself in the mirror and just started screaming and remembered that she had two babies that were taken away from her. And it’s like a switch just flicked and she remembered that she had children, and she remembered that they were taken away from her. And she had blocked that out for so many years, so the poor hairdresser was very upset obviously because this woman was having a form of breakdown while she was having her hair done and then after a couple of weeks of, I suppose kind of informal counselling with the social worker, she felt ready to meet us and then we met in May 1995, when we were twenty-three and she was just forty-two.
CMcG: Wow. I’ll come back to the reunion stuff if that’s alright, but, do you know if she gave informed consent for your adoption?
SL: There’s, there was some delay with our formal adoption and we found out that, well, this is what the nun said anyway so you’re never exactly sure –
CMcG: Was that in St. Louise’s?
SL: In St. Louise’s yes, when Mum and Dad were trying to get the final papers signed, now, I don’t know whether the final papers get signed before or after you’re adopted but –
CMcG: - after -
SL: - after – yes, so Dad was really worried that he wasn’t, they weren’t going to be allowed to keep us and like the minute they brought us home, we were theirs, there was no settling in, we were just their twins straight away and you know, the bonding was very fast. And the final papers weren’t coming through and I don’t think Dad would mind me saying that he was about to put us on a plane and bring us to Canada, through fear of us not –
CMcG: - nothing coming -
SL: Yes. But that didn’t have to happen in the end. And I don’t think he even knows the full ins and outs of why there was a delay or what the delay was or whatever but –
CMcG: It’s not like she absconded!
SL: No, no, from speaking to Margaret later, she definitely didn’t want to give us away. So, I don’t know how the papers got signed or what happened there but, we were legally adopted.
CMcG: Have you ever seen the papers?
SL: No, the only thing I’ve ever seen is my birth cert that says “certificate of a person on the Adopted Register”, that’s the only time I ever saw that.
CMcG: So, other than your sister Etta, have you any other siblings?
SL: We have, well we have a daughter of Margaret’s who is our sister who we’ve never met and she was born four years after us so she would be thirty-six now and she was also adopted and we don’t know where she is.
CMcG: Remind me to give you some information on that.
SL: I think my sister has her date of birth and kind of hearsay what her name was, but –
CMcG: - that’s easily found out -
SL: Yes, so, we, I don’t know if I’d be ready to take somebody else into my family like that but maybe when the dust settles again we will. So, that’s our sister who we’ve never met, our blood sister. And, then my parents, my adoptive parents were blessed with their own son four years after we were adopted. So I have a brother and a sister of the same age funnily enough!
CMcG: So, growing up when you thought about your natural mother, did you know or suspect she was in a laundry?
SL: No, we grew up in the North West, we were, when Mum and Dad adopted us they wanted to just give us the best of health and the best of whatever they could so they, being from working class Dublin, they perceived that the country was the place to do that, so they wanted to bring us to the windy fresh air and the countryside and they brought us to Sligo and we lived there for fifteen years. So, I did all my schooling there. And we were told from, from the time that we started to have words, that we didn’t come from Mammy’s tummy and that somebody very special had us and gave us to them because they needed a baby and that was I suppose the most childlike understandable way that they could make us understand that although they knew that probably not everybody wants to give their babies up, they tried to explain to us in a very kind and positive way that a beautiful person gave these babies to us as a gift.
CMcG: And in terms of when you thought about Margaret, what did you think became of her?
SL: I assumed that this spritely young girl was out going to dances and things went a bit far with her boyfriend and she became pregnant and then she had the babies and then she went back to her life and she was still like, a happy girl going on the bus into town into work, or you know, an ordinary young girl who made a mistake. It used to be called a mistake anyway, I don’t feel like a mistake! So, I just thought that she was this girl who would have thought of us every year on the 5th of March and we, when we would think of her, because every year we had our birthday on the 5th of March and then on the 2nd of December we had another birthday. So, we had a cake and everything on the 2nd of December, all our lives up until the time my adoptive mother died thirteen years ago, we always celebrated on the 2nd of December and we would have a little cake and raise a glass to Margaret, that was our celebration on the 2nd of December. But we didn’t know her name, but we raised a glass to the lady who gave us up.
CMcG: And what did you think became of her?
SL: I assumed that she moved on with her secret, met a nice fella, and lived somewhere in suburban Dublin with three or four kids and thought about us sometimes. And that’s, I just thought she was going to be a woman in a house on a road.