Family history

Every so often the past makes a pass at you. An old school report, a train ticket, a curl from a first haircut falls out of an envelope and sends you tumbling back through the decades. For most of us these things are flotsam and jetsam, of momentary interest, but for Rachel Morris they are vital. It is partly that she works in museums, so is deeply invested in the past, and partly that her family history is so mysterious, fragmentary and ‘soaked in sadness’ that she relies on ‘things’ to help her piece together where she came from, and who she is. This book has two strands. First, it’s

Don Galvin and Mimi Blayney married in December 1944. It was a shotgun wedding. They had been high school sweethearts. Just before Don was about to be shipped out to join the fighting in the South Pacific, Mimi called from New York to say she was pregnant. A rushed wedding across the Mexican border in Tijuana followed: a not uncommon wartime story. But Mimi’s pregnancy turned out to be the first of a dozen, each accompanied by severe morning sickness. Between 1945 and 1965, a procession of children arrived, ten boys and then, at last, even after Mimi’s gynaecologist had warned that further pregnancies might prove life-threatening, came two girls.