Review: The Only Child
Gaby Meares
In 1949 a sixteen year old girl finds herself pregnant after falling for a man who transpires to be married with a family. Her Catholic family are horrified and she is sent to Fairmile on Orcades Island near Seattle, a ‘home’ for ‘fallen women’ run by Catholic nuns. Conditions at Fairmile are nightmarish, as the girls are punished for the smallest misbehaviour (made to kneel on nettles in the freezing chapel for hours is an example of one punishment). The girls are given new names so they will never be able to find each other after they leave the home.
In 2013 Frankie, comes home to the island to start her new job as deputy sheriff and help her mother Diana as she puts the finishing touches to her restoration of The Fairmile Inn, a boutique hotel. When work on the garden is halted by the discovery of a tiny skeleton, and an elderly nun is discovered murdered in a nursing home, Frankie can’t stop herself from helping with the investigation, even though she hasn’t starting her new role yet.
Between 1945 and 1973 one and a half million babies were given up for adoption in the US. More often than not, young mothers were given no choice but to surrender their babies. There was no support from either their families or society in general. Churches played a major role in forcing these girls to surrender their babies to Christian couples who were married but unable to have their own children.
As women’s reproductive rights are again under threat, particularly in America, this novel is a timely reminder of the lasting trauma that can result from women not having access to birth control, sex eduction and safe abortion. It may be fiction, but it reflects a dark history that we never want to see repeated.