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Philomena and Me: Martin Sixsmith, on a mother's search for the child she was forced to give up

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MumsnetGuestBlogs · 08/11/2013 11:50

The story told by my book ‘Philomena’, and the immensely moving film that has been made of it, is one of mothers and children - of the intense maternal bond that develops between them in the first years of life. In that sense the story is a universal one. But the tragic event at the heart of ‘Philomena’ concerns the emotional turmoil that is unleashed when that sacred bond is broken by the callous actions of others.

Philomena Lee was just eighteen when she met a handsome young man at the county fair in Limerick, Ireland one evening in 1952. She had spent the whole of her young life in a Catholic boarding school and she had no idea about the facts of life. After an evening of romance Philomena had fallen pregnant, a shameful thing in 1950s Ireland. Philomena was sent to the nuns at a convent at Roscrea in County Tipperary to give birth as a ‘fallen woman’. She was forced to spend over three years there, slaving in the laundries while also caring for her son, Anthony.

But worse was to follow. When Anthony was three and a half Philomena was told he was being taken from her, given for adoption in America, in return for a hefty ‘donation’ to the church from his new parents. Philomena was devastated. Sent away to England, she trained as a nurse and raised a family. But she kept the ‘guilty secret’ of her illegitimate child for fifty years, not telling her other children or her friends because the church had told her she would be damned if she did so. Full of regret, Philomena spent five decades secretly searching for her lost son, while he – unbeknown to Philomena – was also searching for her.

It was at this stage that I entered the story. On the day of what she knew to be Anthony’s fiftieth birthday, Philomena had finally told her daughter Jane that she had a long lost half-brother. Jane knew I’d been a journalist and asked me for help in finding him.

My own background was in foreign reporting and politics – I’d been the BBC’s correspondent in Moscow and Washington and had worked in Whitehall under Tony Blair – so at first I was dubious about taking on what journalists mockingly refer to as a ‘human interest story’.

It took just one meeting with Philomena to rid me of that cynical attitude. From the very first moment I was struck by the immense humanity of the woman. She was friendly, bright and hugely likeable – qualities that had been in short supply in Westminster and Whitehall. We hit it off straight away. And over the next four years as I worked with her to try to unravel what had become of her lost child I came to appreciate Philomena’s emotional wisdom, the way she took what the world had thrown at her and refused to let it make her bitter or ruin her life.

The detective story I embarked on took me to Ireland and to America. And what I discovered about the forces that had separated a mother from her child made me very angry. I managed to find out that Anthony had become a successful lawyer and had risen to the heights of the American political world. Renamed Michael Hess he had served as the White House’s Chief Legal Counsel under Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior, but he had never stopped thinking about and yearning for his mother.

Like her, he had gone back several times to the convent where he was born and asked the nuns if they would put him in touch with her. Some of his visits coincided almost exactly with Philomena’s own trips to the convent, so the nuns knew that both of them wanted to find each other. But, perhaps ashamed at the church’s role in selling babies, they refused to help.

If you read the book ‘Philomena’, you will discover the true story of the lost son who made a material success of his new life, but was haunted by his love for his absent mother and by painful regrets that blighted his existence.

If you watch the film of ‘Philomena’ you will see a faithful recreation of the bond that developed between her and me as we embarked on our shared detective odyssey. The film is a moving mix of laugh out loud humour and tender, poignant sadness. But it has a powerful emotional message. It reminds us that life can dish up some pretty bad things. None of us can choose what lands on our head; but we can choose how we react to life’s tragedies. And the relationship between Philomena and Martin depicted in the film is a pointed demonstration of two people reacting very differently.

Philomena is shown to be full of forgiveness and understanding. Her emotional wisdom, unshakeable faith and breadth of spirit restores your faith in humanity. She accepts life’s unfairnesses and gets on with the business of living. Martin on the other hand is angry about the injustices of the past and speaks out forcefully. He cannot share Philomena’s serenity and it leaves him restless. Philomena says, ‘It must be tiring being so angry all the time’.

There are of course differences between the Martin Sixsmith played onscreen by Steve Coogan and myself. I am not such an angry person, and I am an agnostic rather than a convinced atheist. But I share the film’s intolerance of injustice in all walks of life, and I share its admiration for a woman like Philomena who has the strength to rise above them.

The book ‘Philomena’, by Martin Sixsmith is published by Pan Macmillan at £7.99. ‘Philomena’ the film is in cinemas now.

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LakeDistrictBabe · 08/11/2013 13:20

This seems a book and a good movie, although given the subject I guess there will a few issues concerning the church (in USA it got a R rating, probably due to that....).

What I don't get is why the journalist put his twitter account at the end of it and you can't follow him because his tweets are protected... :/