IRELAND
Irish Times
Lorna Siggins
Thu, Jun 12, 2014
When Annie Smith was ordered out of the house by her father over 70 years ago in Dublin, she spent several nights sheltering in a watchman’s hut before taking refuge in St Patrick’s mother-and-baby home on the Navan Road.
Annie, christened Honora, was 22, had a job in the Ever Ready battery factory and was six months pregnant. Life had not been easy. Her own mother had died when she was seven, and her father, a Guinness brewery employee, had survived the first World War as a British army sergeant-major.
“She had lived with her father and siblings. He remarried when she was 12, and they were among the first group of inner-city residents who were moved out to new housing estates being developed in Cabra,”Annie’s daughter, Nuala, now living in Connemara, says. “But they spent five years in Keogh Barracks in Inchicore before that move, and my mother says it was horrendous.”
On finding herself with child, Annie told her boyfriend, who was from a middle-class Dublin family. He tried to persuade her go to to England with him.
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