My birth was a sin and a crime. I was born in the Tuam Mother Baby Home to an inmate serving a year of penal servitude, her crime an out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

The House Children begins when Mary Margaret Joyce is six years old and living with the Cleary family who she has been fostered to. There was no welcome for the little girl; instead she has no place at the table, is fed scraps at the hearth after the family has eaten, sleeps at night on the floor by the fire with a blanket and the family dog to warm her, and is left to wander the farm while her foster siblings go to school. When she calls Mrs Cleary Mam, her position is spelt out in no uncertain terms. ‘I’m not yer mam, yer an illegitimate.’

Left behind by the Clearys following an act of domestic violence, she charged with ‘being destitute and not an orphan‘ and is sentenced to nine years at St Thomas’s Industrial School run by the Sisters of Mercy at Ballinasloe, Galway. Now one of the House children, she is assigned the number 27 and, as there are too many Marys in the school already, she is called Peg, a diminutive of Margaret, Mary’s middle name. She regards the name change as a loss, being ‘forced to abandon the one thing that was mine’.

The novel traces Peg’s life during her time at the school and beyond as she begins her life in the wider world. She adapts to the austere life at the school with its relentless and monotonous routines of prayer, school, and work both within the convent and outside on the convent’s farm. Despite the watery cocoa, lumpy porridge and the bread greasy with dripping, the food is at least filling, and there is a comfort in the sense of belonging she experiences among the other girls, something that was lacking in her earlier life. The nuns, whose responsibility is to care for them, are strict and sometimes cruel. Peg learns to make her way in this new world and to keep out of trouble. The children’s basic needs are met but they are never hugged, never made to feel loved by the adults.

There are moments of lightness, and occasional freedoms: a visit to the local horse fair, putting up decorations for Christmas, choosing a dress from the convent’s collection to wear at her First Communion. A lucky few, Peg among them, are permitted brief summer holidays beyond the convent walls with a loving family. It is this experience that stirs in Peg a longing to know who her mother was and why she was abandoned by her – a matter that grows in importance in the latter part of the novel and has a life-long impact on children like Peg.

Peg tells her story as a first-person narrative in retrospect but, for the most part, with the understanding that she would have had at the time. Life in the industrial school and the interactions of both children and nuns are realistic and balanced. As well as the nuns that are strict and inexplicably cruel, there are one or two who show the girls kindness and give them the attention they naturally crave. And while this is the story of the children within the industrial school system, the reader is given glimpses of the lives of the mothers as well as the censorious nature of the society that designed these places as a remedy for the ‘problem’ of the children of young women who were pregnant and unmarried.

This heart-rending story is told in an understated prose that underlines both Peg and the other children’s acceptance of the narrow life they have been handed; the best most have to look forward to beyond the gates of the school is the drudgery of a domestic servant. It also shows the resilience of the human spirit in the ways, despite everything, the children draw comfort from each other, their occasional bursts of high spirits and, most of all, the way they just go on. The novel opens a window on not just the hardships of those children consigned to these institutions but on a society where morality was actively policed. The straitened lives of the children are bad enough but the acts of cruelty and the lack of warmth and love makes it so much worse. Of all Peg’s experiences throughout the novel, I found her treatment as a small foster child the most harrowing – neglected, treated as less than human and hidden away from the public because of the circumstances of her birth, something no child has any no control over.

The House Children is fictional but is based on the author Heidi Daniele’s interviews with former house children. St Thomas’s Industrial School at Ballinasloe is fictional but is modelled on St Joseph’s Certified Industrial School at the same place. While its absence in no way detracts from the novel itself, personally, I would have liked an historical note at the end of the novel which provided some context for the school within the network of institutions established for the ‘care’ of children and their mothers: mother and baby homes, Magdalen laundries, industrial schools, orphanages. A reflection on any ways the treatment of children in these institutions was different in Ireland from elsewhere, and why, would have been helpful for readers outside of Ireland. Each country within the anglosphere has its own history of similar institutions – Catholic, Protestant and secular – often established with the best of intentions, but all falling far short for many, with stories emerging over the last twenty years of similar experiences to those of the children in the novel. Books such as The House Children are important as they show these neglected children as more than bare statistics – they give them human faces, ensuring that we do not forget them. They also allow us to reflect on the social beliefs of past times, as well as our own, so that we do not permit the past to repeat itself.