Rite and Reason: She was a single Irish mother of another generation who spent her life in exile, writes Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent.
Her name was Mary and she was with child. She had arrived with her fiancé in London. They had left Ireland because of her pregnancy. Neither had ever been in a city before, not even Dublin. Both got jobs, she in a branch of WH Smiths on Oxford Street. Soon he was gone. He was not prepared to share her plight, regardless of his part in it.
He fled to the US.
She was in despair, forsaken. One day she lay down in a park, her big belly obstructing the sun, and begged, pleaded with God to take her and her baby.
But He didn't. It seemed He had forsaken her too.
Noticing her distress in the WH Smith shop one day, an older woman who worked there approached Mary and asked what the matter was. She wept her sorry story. Deeply moved, the Englishwoman invited her to live in her family's large house in south London. The basement there was fitted out and turned into a home for Mary.
Mary and her son lived there for the best part of three decades.
She worked all her life, and paid an agreed rent to the kind Englishwoman, as she reared her son. She had little to do with the Irish community in London.
She attended Mass for the sake of the boy, though her own faith had been badly shaken. Soon she got a job in an art shop near where she lived. It was run by an unorthodox Irish couple. They did not judge.
She liked them and the clientele who came to the shop. They were mostly theatre people. She enjoyed the instinctive tolerance, the penchant for gossip, their (by the standards of the time) outrageous personal arrangements.
Beneath all that "luvvy" stuff she recognised an honesty about human relations that was absent in mainstream society.
Mary did not visit her family in Ireland very often, but kept contact with one brother. He was a businessman and a good man who helped her out and would come over to see her. But even he was pushed to the limit when she came home to Ireland.
He used to ask her to hide in the back of his car, behind the front seats, so the neighbours would not see and ask questions. Much worse was her mother's attitude. At Mass she would not sit in the same pew as Mary.
There was a sense from Mary of accepting these humiliations as her due. For she had sinned against her own moral template. She was not worthy. A lifetime of exile was as it should be.
She did not blame her mother, her brother, her fiancé, the church, Ireland. At least not with any conviction.There was no self-pity, just suggestions of self-loathing. .
She was never with another man for the rest of her life after the father of her child disappeared to the US (where he married and raised a family).
How could she expect any man to take her on board and she with a child? How could she ever tell a man such a thing? How could she face rejection again? Better not get involved at all.
She sent her son to Catholic schools in London and hoped he'd be treated well. Her badge of shame, he was her little star.
She hoped all those kids from regular families would not humiliate him for her sin. She hoped he would not feel humiliated when he realised the truth.
As he grew up he became religious, as well as curious and confused about Ireland. Was he Irish or English? It was difficult for her to encourage an Irish identity in him.
He became very Catholic and, in his early 20s, worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. He remains a devout Catholic. He married in the Middle East and now lives in north America. Far, far, away.
In the early 1990s Mary returned to live with her brother in Ireland. She became ill, and over a period of years declined painfully. She died in 2000, as unobtrusively as she had lived. And as well-liked by those who knew her. Loved, even.
When I met Mary, that student summer in London, her story was a great blow to my then green vision of Ireland. Our "dreary Eden" as Seán Ó Faoláin described it. I was a little older than her son.
The next summer I stayed with them. She even organised a job for me.We grew very fond of one another.
But our friendship had a deep impact on my attitude to her mother, who was my godmother.
That lovely woman had spoiled me as a child. Adored me. Even today, many, many years later, I remember the depth of bond as she clasped me to her, the deep affection in the timbre of her voice. The quaver of that sound.
I could not feel the same about her again after hearing Mary's story. I could not reconcile the warm woman I knew with the one who refused to share a pew with her daughter. It did not fit.
A wedge entered our relationship - my judgement. She died before it was removed. I will too before I forgive myself.