The train journey from Dublin's Heuston Station to Kent Station in Cork was the final leg of Noelle McCarthy’s trek from New Zealand to Ireland in 2017. The Cork native was bringing her 10-week old daughter Eve to meet her mum, Carol, for the first time. Exhausted from the journey and from feeding the baby for the past 27 hours; it was only weeks later that Noelle thought about the time her mother made the exact same train journey:
"That journey to have her first child adopted would have taken her from Kent to Heuston. She would have done those train rides. First of all as a pregnant woman and then coming back down to Cork with no baby. And that was just… you know, suddenly I understood something that I hadn’t understood before about her and I felt floored by that."
Noelle is a broadcaster and podcast producer who grew up in Cork and now lives in New Zealand with her husband and daughter. She has written a memoir about her mother Carol - Grand: Becoming my Mother’s Daughter, and she spoke to fellow Cork native Brendan O’Connor about how writing the book deepened her understanding of the complex woman who raised her. She writes about her mother’s alcoholism and how becoming a mother herself unlocked profound emotions about her own mother’s experience.
Noelle’s mother Carol gave birth to six children; Noelle was the third born child. Carol’s first child was adopted and the second died. Noelle says these things were known, but led to different versions of the family narrative:
"I say in the book I’m the eldest of four, or the middle of six, depending on which version of our family history you want. And I knew that. You know, we knew it growing up. We knew that my mother had had two children before us."
Noelle says she began to feel differently about this when she became a parent herself:
"It was only after I had my daughter, that again, I started thinking about it. Not even just thinking about it, Brendan, feeling it on a sort of visceral level"
Sitting on that train from Dublin to Cork, feeding her baby and thinking about her Mum waiting on the platform in Kent Station to meet her grandchild, Noelle says she connected with her mother’s past in a profoundly physical way:
"It was that physical feeling of being a breastfeeding mother and getting down to Kent Station, where my mother was waiting, you know, in a plethora of blow-up balloons. She’d pink hair, the balloons were purple – the whole thing was all go. She was ready. She was the welcoming party for Eve Alexandra Hera Daniell, my daughter."
McCarthy has a captivating turn of phrase and she does not hold back, as she describes being raised by a mother who drank every day in the pubs of Cork, bringing little Noelle along with her. She likens her mother to a werewolf; at once exciting and dangerous, someone who fought for a brilliant education for her children and who turned into a monster with one drop of drink. Noelle says she experienced this transformation in herself, years later:
"There is a certain ferocity that comes with drunkenness and with a certain type of drinking, you know the change that comes with that and the personality shift that comes with that and the consequences of that; you know, the devastation."
The tensions of her childhood and the sometimes difficult relationship with her mother didn’t stop Noelle from travelling thousands of kilometres from New Zealand to introduce her new baby to her Mum:
"As soon as my daughter was born, even though I had that antagonism with my mother, I had to show her to her."
The trip home came not a moment too soon, Noelle says. Her mother died of cancer in Cork in 2020, just as COVID hit and only a few short years after first meeting her first grandchild:
"It was very near the end of her life. That felt to me like a universal experience we have as children when we suddenly find out something about our parents that has maybe taken us too long to realise."
Noelle places her family history in the context of a changing Ireland. She says she was told that after her mother’s first child was adopted, things changed in her family and in the country as a whole:
"I loved how that seemed to sum up the change that was coming. I was born in 1978 and my mother’s earlier pregnancies were in the early '70s. This was a time when Ireland was changing. It was coming, there was a way forward for, you know ‘unmarried mothers’, as we called them, to be able to build a life and to be a parent."
One of the reasons why she started writing the book, Noelle says, was hearing a fellow broadcaster speaking at a writers’ festival in New Zealand, where she shared her family history:
"She was talking about her mother, who was from Nottingham, maybe or somewhere in the north of England; went in to give birth to her with a borrowed wedding ring, you know that she had just put on, because she knew she needed to. That stuck in my mind and I thought about that generation of women and how it would have been for them."
Noelle talks more about her writing process, her own journey with alcoholism and her broadcasting career in New Zealand in a fascinating interview which you can listen back to in full here.
Grand: Becoming my Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy is now available in print and audiobook.
If you’ve been affected by any of the topics in this interview, information on helplines is available here.