Michael Gilmore

Michael Gilmore is introduced through his mother’s memory of him as a young child, a presence that makes her private recognition of bodily vulnerability inseparable from the wish to protect her son.

Early Childhood and His Mother’s Protection

Not long after the family had moved to Glasgow, Stella took Michael, who had not yet started school, for a walk through the university, which was open to the public. When rain drove them to shelter beneath the columns of a Victorian building, they found a sign pointing to a museum and went up in the lift together. Michael ran ahead when the doors opened into the Hunterian Museum. In its entrance hall, Stella stopped before a display showing a woman whose body had been opened to reveal her full-term child. The image held her attention not simply as an anatomical exhibit: she felt herself becoming the exposed, wounded woman represented there. When Michael came back, Stella placed herself between him and the drawing and led him away towards the dinosaurs and stuffed animals, sparing him the sight and the questions she feared it would prompt.

Birth, Survival, and Family Memory

Michael’s beginnings are recalled as a passage through danger into family life. In a hospital’s temporary nursery, Gerry Gilmore was shown a sleeping newborn in a Moses basket beside an office desk. The room’s shelves held black binders and folded bed linen; against one wall, deckchairs leaned unused. Mavis, a nurse, told Gerry the baby was perfect and that staff thought he should see him before the child was moved to the regular nursery. Faced with the fact of a son where he had almost expected there to be none, Gerry looked down at the small boy, swaddled in a white sheet, his wet hair and tiny hand visible. He asked whether he could touch him.

Mavis reassured Gerry that he would not wake the baby, who had already been through a great deal, and mentioned that the chaplain had baptised him just in case. Gerry gently stroked Michael’s cheek, first with the back of a finger and then with his fingertips. He made a vow to love the child for the rest of his life, sealing the moment with a kiss conveyed from his own fingertips to the baby’s face. Michael’s survival therefore becomes a defining family memory: his father’s tenderness is bound to the awareness that the newborn had come through a perilous beginning.

Years later, Stella disclosed the circumstances behind that peril to Kathleen Walsh. She had been very pregnant in Belfast in the early 1970s when, amid an ambush, she was shot in the stomach and left on the pavement. Unsure whether she was bleeding or her waters had broken, she prayed that the child in her womb might live and promised to devote the rest of her life to God. The bullet passed through her, entering one side and leaving through the other. Doctors told her that the only lasting damage was that she could have no more children; Michael would be her only child.

Stella described his survival as either a miracle or the result of the baby somehow ducking the bullet. The incident appeared in Irish newspapers, but not under her name: it was reduced to the fact of a pregnant woman being shot. After the family moved to Scotland, few people seemed to know what had happened. Stella chose not to announce it, because she found that the shooting became the only subject people wanted to discuss. It remained an unspoken part of the family’s history, although the consequences were plain: Michael was an only child, and his life was linked in Stella’s memory to the vow she had made while fearing he might die.

Adulthood and Family Continuity

By the time Stella speaks about him to Kathleen Walsh, Michael is no longer the small boy she once shepherded through the museum. She describes him as a man, and as a father: he and his family live in Canada, and his son is Toby. The brief account places Michael within a continuing family line, shifting the emphasis from his precarious beginning to the life that followed it.

Stella and Gerry Gilmore had travelled to see Toby when he was a year old. The detail establishes that the distance between the generations is geographical rather than an absence of family connection: Michael lives far away, but his parents have visited his child. In Stella’s account, Michael remains her only son, while Toby carries the family story into another generation.

Narrative Significance

Michael’s place in these episodes is defined by the way others remember and protect him. As a small child, he is led away from an image that Stella experiences as an echo of her own wounded body; in the family’s account of his birth, he is the child whose survival prompts Gerry’s vow of lifelong love. Later, Stella’s disclosure to Kathleen connects that survival to a promise she made in terror, and to the lasting consequence that Michael would remain her only child. The sequence moves from protection, through a father’s first touch, to a mother’s belated telling: Michael’s life is the thread joining these distinct acts of care, while the danger surrounding his beginning remains part of the family history even when it goes unspoken.