A Magdalene Rose: Discover a Life; discover a story II

There are so many aspects to my book, A Magdalene Rose. It is a story that is rich in people and places, all with a story to tell. It is a story of how I as a son and a grandson sought to satisfy a promise made to one of the people in this story, my father.

My father's start in life was more than humbling, starting as it did through separation and a State & Religious Institutionalisation. But like any young man, he found a woman whom he wanted to be a firm fixture in his life, bringing him a stability of family life that had been denied to him.

Annie-Kate Loftus married him and with it took on his secrets and kept them hidden until her own death. But the keeping of this Institutional secret was difficult and at times impossible. She had joined a legion of women who had married Magdalene boys, having to learn as she did, how to live a life where one half of the marriage didn't even know their true identity.

My book brings her story alive and reveals a woman who was tough and tender, secret and contradictory, loved and loving. She could have been you; she culd have been any woman. Read her story now.