Finding Margaret: Andrew Pierce’s search for his Irish mother
For many TV viewers, Andrew Pierce is the arch-Tory who scraps frequently with the Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire on Sky News over the Conservatives, the British Labour Party, Brexit or the general state of Britain.
Usually, the views of Pierce – whose moniker on X/Twitter is @toryboypierce – are telegraphed in advance: this is a man, after all, who works for the Daily Mail and used to take Margaret Thatcher to lunch in the Ritz in her retirement years.
In truth, there is more to Pierce, who was adopted aged two from a Catholic orphanage by a London couple who had moved to Swindon, as the book tracing his efforts to find his Irish-born birth mother reveals.
The journey is painful, and he makes no attempt to hide his own deeply conflicted emotions in a way that will be understood by anyone adopted, or by anyone who lost a mother at a young age.
The wounds go deep: the years of bed-wetting in his new, deeply loving home, or the skin boils needing painful treatment – almost certainly a psychosomatic response to traumas endured in the Nazareth House orphanage in Birmingham.
The journey to find his birth father is unfinished. A Galway construction labourer, Jimmy Coffey, killed in a Birmingham traffic accident, figured prominently, but, in the end, he was found not have to been.
Coffey was “a toe-tag” father: the orphanage, in collusion with doctors, nurses or priest, took the identity of recently dead men and used their names to ensure that the “Father” category on birth certificates was not left as “Unknown”.
One wonders how many others have faced needless distress searching for birth parents because of such deceptions, especially for those without Pierce’s journalistic skills to track information down.
Eventually, with friends, he traced Mayo-born Margaret to her Birmingham home, where she had married and reared four children. They met once in a British Home Stores cafe, though she later stood him up three times.
Sometimes, one wonders if he is being truthful with himself when he says he wanted to find Margaret to ensure that she was doing well, and that she, in turn, could know he had turned out all right.
She finished her life with dementia in a nursing home. Pierce visited, taking solace from her smiles that she knew who he was. Perhaps so, but one feels that more reflects Pierce’s needs, than his mother’s recognition. One hopes otherwise.
