Tim Brannigan was born on May 10, 1966. This, he says, was also the day he died. At least, that is what his mother, Peggy, told her family, her parents, her other young children. The baby had been stillborn; it was a terrible tragedy. Relatives put away their gifts, lit candles, said prayers, wept. Hidden a few rooms away in a hospital cot, Tim gurgled away, a healthy newborn.
Peggy pretended that her son was dead so she might be able to keep him. “Killing” him was an act of love. The secret that she knew and almost no one else did was that the baby would be dark-skinned — the result of her brief affair with a young black man.
Peggy was a married woman with three sons, living in a white, working-class area of Belfast. Had the affair been with a white man, she might have been able to pass off the baby as her husband’s and carry on. But she knew that his colour would make this impossible and, as the child grew inside her, so did her panic. Abortion was not an option: it was illegal in Northern Ireland and, in any case, it went against her beliefs.
So she came up with a plan; an extraordinary, cunning but risky subterfuge which, if it worked, would mean that she could one day raise the child as her own. Incredibly, she managed to persuade staff at the Templemore Hospital in Belfast to collude in the stillbirth story. Five days after he was born, Tim was quietly smuggled from the hospital to a baby home, St Joseph’s, in the city. Here he would live, the staff fully aware that his real mother desperately wanted him and one day intended to “adopt” him.
Peggy had told an even more audacious lie to her husband Tom, with whom her relationship was rocky and who must have realised that the baby wasn’t his. She told him that she had been raped by a black man. Peggy said that she had sought the advice of a priest, who had advised the couple to support each other and “deal with the consequences”. Tom agreed to go along with the stillbirth story for the sake of appearances.
Today Brannigan is 43, has a prison sentence behind him and has written a book about his exceptional life that has all the makings of a film script. It is an enthralling read, mainly because Peggy’s plan — amazingly — worked. Tim was eventually “adopted” by his mother, friends and relatives simply thinking that she had taken pity on a child at the orphanage where she sometimes volunteered, and whom no one else wanted.
Nobody but her husband knew a scintilla of the truth. To his credit he never objected to the cute, dark-skinned, curly-haired toddler joining the household, the couple, whose marriage had already been crumbling, went on to separate.
Tim was raised as the one black child in a family of white siblings, and almost the only non-white boy in the Falls Road area. The “adoption” issue was very rarely mentioned and his grandparents died without knowing that he was their blood relative. He remembers once, when he was 3 or 4, looking at the pale palms of his hands and asking “will I ever be white?” When the answer came back “No”, he felt disappointed; he had assumed that his blackness would fade away and he would look more like his brothers. It wasn’t until he was 19 that Peggy dropped the bombshell that he wasn’t adopted at all but was her real son.
We do this interview in the terraced house in Beechmount where Tim grew up, his earliest memory watching armed British soldiers in the street outside and feeling frightened. He still lives here today, a portrait of his mother on the wall, although she died in 2004 from a brain tumour at 71.
He can remember vividly the moment she told him the truth. They were at a family party and Peggy and Tim were chatting in a corner when, suddenly, perhaps emboldened by drink, she said: “Timothy, love, I’ve something to tell you. I’m your real mum and you are my son. You are not adopted.”
As he reeled from this news, there came more. His father had a name, Michael Ekue. He was from Ghana in West Africa and had been working as a doctor in Belfast; they met at a dance and he was, said Peggy, “tall” and “gorgeous”. His reply when she said “I’m pregnant” was “I’m married”. He suggested they “get rid of it”. He never contributed a penny to Tim’s upkeep, even though he was middle-class and knew of his existence. Once, years later, when Tim was a toddler standing at the garden gate, his father had seen him when he called round trying to persuade Peggy to meet him again.
You might think that this maternal revelation would be a thunderbolt moment when the world shifts on its axis and suddenly looks different. After all, Tim’s experience was the reverse of that of thousands of children who grow up assuming that they are a “natural” part of a family, then one day are told they are adopted. In his case it suddenly transpired that he had not been given up by his birth mother after all; he had not been “rejected”.
Perhaps it is a testament to how loved and wanted his mother made him feel that this, Tim says, was not how it felt. Yes, he felt happy. Yes, he had a cry. But he was not overwhelmed.
“I guess it was a case of ‘You’ve just confirmed what I always felt — you are my mum’,” he says. “I never called her my adoptive mum or stepmother. This felt like the most natural place in the world to be. I didn’t walk round every day feeling adopted. But I never liked the words ‘adopted’ or ‘home’ — I associated them with punishment and somewhere that bad kids went.”
Did he ever feel like a “lesser” son, when he believed that he was adopted? “Oh God, no. She was exceptionally close to me. I would say I probably felt more of a confidante to her; she leant on me a lot,” he says. “But I had a very different relationship with my mum than anyone else.”
Indeed, so intense was the mother and son’s relationship that some people used to joke that they resembled a couple — not in the incestuous sense but in their easy closeness, sometimes peaceful, sometimes bickering. To her, having this secret was perhaps like having an “illicit” relationship played out in a domestic environment. If a woman in an unhappy marriage has a child from an affair with someone to whom she was irresistibly attracted, it is logical that she might feel differently towards that child — not love the others less but be more protective, perhaps even more invested, in him.
Tim noticed that his mother was harder on him than on his brothers, always nagging him to speak properly (he was not allowed to call her “Ma” like the others), pushing him to do well at school because she knew that he would be judged more harshly than them in the outside world because of his colour. Perhaps significantly, Tim is the only one of five sons (Peggy had another son after him) who went to university and got a degree. His elder brothers are married with children but he is still single. Without his mother’s pushing, he says, he would probably never have gone back to school.
“She was obsessed with how black people were doing,” he says. “If we saw a black man wearing a shirt and tie she would say, ‘Oh, I hope he’s doing well for himself’. She took on the worries of every black person she saw.”
You have only to close your eyes for a moment and imagine yourself in Peggy Brannigan’s position to get a sense of the stress, dread and fear she must have felt as the bump blossomed. The plan could so easily have been rumbled at any stage: on leaving the hospital after giving birth Peggy became hysterically upset. This was because, by coincidence, she saw Tim being carried into a car to be taken to the home. The relatives with her just assumed that it was the distress of a bereaved mother.
At weekends she resumed visiting orphaned children at St Joseph’s as she had done for many years, often bringing the little black boy home and doting on him to the point where relatives suggested that maybe she should adopt him “to make up for the child she lost”. This was what she had secretly been hoping for. One weekend he came home to her, contracted measles and never went back.
He grew up, like his mother and most of the neighbours, a fierce republican, with local IRA men sometimes visiting the house and leaving “surprises” behind. Once, as a young boy, he found two shopping bags full of gelignite behind the sofa. His republicanism was often met with incredulity, people remarking that because he was black it wasn’t his political “struggle”. At school he was called names such as “Kunta Kinte” (after the main character in the 1970s slave drama Roots) but he says that the most systematic racist abuse came from members of the RUC and the British Army, who would make him say his name to laugh at his Belfast accent.
Like most houses in the street, their home was often searched by the RUC. Years later, in 1990, after he had finished his degree at the University of Liverpool, the IRA came knocking again. They wanted to leave two rifles in the house overnight. Tim refused at first but then relented, saying that they could leave them in an old unlocked car parked in the driveway. That night they were discovered by the RUC. He served four years and eight months of a seven-year sentence. He describes himself now as a pro-ceasefire republican.
Tim’s story has more twists. In recent years he has tracked down his father, Michael, now an eminent doctor in Ghana who specialises in malaria research, has worked for the United Nations and has five grown-up children who live in Britain. It was Peggy’s express wish that he should do so. “She wanted him to see what she’d made of his son,” he says. It was not a fairytale ending. Although he agreed to meet Tim at his hotel when he flew out to Ghana and they had a drink together, the occasion was stilted and it was obvious that his father had no wish to begin a relationship with his newly found son.
Tim says that his father is an impressive, highly intelligent man, very tall just as his mother had said, who turned up looking immaculate in a long cotton African shirt and M&S charcoal trousers with sharp creases. He talked fondly of Peggy. But he is evidently someone who can compartmentalise his emotions. He avoided talking about the pregnancy and his behaviour, the elephant in the room.
Tim felt hurt when his father said that his greatest achievement was “putting all my children through private education”, thinking the remark crass in the circumstances. Some of his half-siblings who are living in London, despite initial enthusiasm at the idea of a new brother, have also since cut off contact. One of his brothers told him never to make contact again, possibly to protect their mother, to whom Dr Ekue is still married. Tim suspects that they may think he wants money from his father, an idea that he says insults him. “I have no wish for his money,” he says.
The last time he spoke to his father was by phone on Christmas Day 2008. He took his chance to have a more personal conversation and asked how he had met his mother. “I don’t have to answer that,” said his father. “That’s personal.” He has not responded to texts or phone calls since.
Tim doesn’t regret making contact and is glad that he met his father and one of his siblings (this happened in London). But, he says, “I resent the power they have to now turn their backs on it. If I was under 16 I would have legal claims that I don’t have now.”
He knows that if Peggy were alive she would be bitterly disappointed by Dr Ekue’s reaction. “She would have lost a lot of faith in him. She always referred to his good breeding — there was a deference there; she never thought someone like him would be interested in her. She would have wanted him to be more of a man than he proved to be.”
What did he hope to get from making contact? “The perfect outcome? Probably acknowledgement — if I sent him an e-mail, he’d reply. I wasn’t expecting to be lying on the sofa in charge of the remote.”
He has learnt that when a child contacts a parent in circumstances like this, someone will usually get hurt. That is what a social worker told him when he embarked on tracking down his father. “No matter how good your intentions, people get hurt,” he says. “People are never what you expect. It’s not like the movies: this is real life.” But he says that he wouldn’t change anything about his life, and when he gets upset he always returns to a sustaining thought. “I had a hero for a mother,” he says, “who fought from the day I was born for what she thought was right.”
Where Are You Really From? by Tim Brannigan, Blackstaff Press, £9.99
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