A search is under way for two lesbian grandmothers who inspired a new children’s book after a chance encounter with a pantomime dame at Blackpool Pride.

The women, whose names are not known, attended a reading by the popular performer Mama G in 2021, complaining to her about the lack of diversity in young literature.

Mama G said she had been reading books to children at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens when the women asked if there were any featuring lesbian grandmothers.

The question left her stumped. “I was like, erm, no. I don’t actually think I’ve ever seen lesbian grandmothers in a story, not even as a subsidiary character,” she said. One of the women, clearly disappointed, told her it was “so hard to find yourself represented in books”.

The conversation prompted Mama G, whose real name is Robert Pearce, to write a children’s picture book where two older queer women are “front and centre for a change”.

The book, The Proudest Bird in the World, will be published on 1 July and Mama G wants to dedicate it to the pair who inspired it – but first she must track them down.

Yet despite weeks of appeals on social media, radio and newspapers, their identity remains a mystery. “I don’t have their names, I don’t even know if they were from Blackpool – they could have been visiting,” Mama G said, comparing the social media campaign to a hunt for a missing person.

The women are described as about 5ft 6in with short hair, one with “salt and pepper loose curls”, and possibly wearing jeans and stripy tops when they met Mama G in 2021.

Despite spending nearly two decades championing diversity in family storytelling, Mama G said the conversation with the women was a “wake-up call”. “These two women are facing an uphill battle when it comes to representation because they’re a minority within a minority and it really stuck with me,” she said.

“Lesbian visibility is considerably less than gay male visibility in just the media in general. The visibility of older LGBT people is greatly reduced from the visibility of LGBT-coded children or young adults.”

A US study in 2022 found that despite a significant increase in the number of LGBTQ+ related books for children since 2000, those characters were rarely the central protagonists and that some groups, such as bisexual people, were “completely absent”.

The Proudest Bird in the World is about an ordinary white bird, Gilbert, who longs to express who they truly are and stumbles upon a Pride parade, where they discover that true colours do not have to live on the outside.

The main characters are two lesbian grandparents who educate Gilbert and their granddaughter on what the colours of the rainbow flag mean to them.

Mama G, who is performing at Edinburgh fringe this summer, said the lack of diversity in children’s books was still a problem, despite the efforts of a number of authors and smaller publishers.

She said publishers told her they “weren’t comfortable” taking on her first book, Oh Yes I Am!, about a boy who lives in a grey world but learns to make it sparkle, because it “could be taken as a LGBT story”.

That book, published in 2023, and The Proudest Bird in the World, were picked up by smaller independent companies.

Mama G said larger publishers had shied away from books celebrating diversity because of their profit margins and that “there’s quite a lot pushback against the community.

“I think to get diverse books published you’ve got to look at smaller publishing houses because they’re in a better position to take a risk,” she said. “I’m excited to see what happens with this book – and I hope that if we do find the lesbian grandmothers, they will be proud to be a part of it.”

In 2014, the bodies of nearly 800 babies and small children were found in the septic tank of a former mother and baby home in Tuam, Galway. They had been deposited over four decades, a practice that only ended in 1961. This grisly discovery, made by a local historian, forced a long overdue public reckoning in Ireland.

Why was it considered necessary, by individual families as well as the Catholic church and the Irish state, to place unmarried pregnant girls in brutal institutions, to subject their babies to coerced adoption, often abroad, and to treat the children that remained with such indifference or active malice that in Bessborough, one of the largest homes in the country, the infant mortality rate in the early 1950s was five times the national rate? Why was there such extreme shame and secrecy about sex and reproduction outside of marriage?

Clair Wills is a cultural historian who has written extensively on Irish history. She’s half Irish herself, on her mother’s side, and though she was born and raised in England she has a personal history with the mother and baby homes. In 1954, her uncle Jackie got a local teenager called Lily pregnant. His mother, Wills’s grandmother Molly, refused to permit their marriage. Instead, Lily was incarcerated in Bessborough, where her daughter Mary was born the following year.

Mary spent the entirety of her childhood trapped inside orphanages and industrial schools run by nuns, though she was only 25 miles away from the tumbledown little farm near Skibbereen in Cork where Molly still lived, and where Wills and her siblings spent idyllic summer holidays. As an adult, Mary too became pregnant and was rejected by the father’s family, an event so traumatic in its repetition of her unhappy history that she took her own life.

Wills first heard about Mary in the late 1980s, shortly after she’d given birth to her own baby, also out of wedlock. This time there was no question of being shuttled back to Ireland and taken to the mother and baby home, or of adoption under pressure of familial disgrace. But a different kind of illegitimacy hampered her attempts to understand what had happened to Mary: the sense of illegitimacy attendant on being not-Irish, or not Irish enough. She’d grown up in England, after all. Despite those potato-picking summers, “I didn’t even live in Ireland. I wasn’t ‘properly’ Irish.”

She made furtive attempts on the archive anyway: interviewing nuns, gathering up birth certificates, looking for graves, an uncertain detective periodically checked by shame. Gradually, she came to feel she didn’t have the right to delve any further into the intimate details of Lily and Mary’s painful lives. Her task instead was to discover how her ordinary, statistically average rural family could have colluded in a national act of such cruelty and disavowal.

As the subtitle suggests, it’s Molly who lies at the heart of this story. Molly, born the week that the Irish nationalist MP Charles Parnell died in Hove, in the arms of Kitty O’Shea, his former lover, then wife, with whom he had three illegitimate children. Wills argues convincingly that the revelation of Parnell’s long adulterous love affair altered the course of the struggle for Irish independence, allowing the Catholic church to assume its death grip on the private lives of the Irish people.

Molly came of age in the war of independence, and to Wills’s shock tumbled perilously close to Lily’s situation in her own youth. Sexual continence, or the successful performance of it, spelled security for a working-class country girl, while a slip (which might, of course, be rape) could precipitate catastrophe. The only difference was that by the time Lily became pregnant, the system of silencing had become institutionalised, a national bureaucracy run by religious orders and government departments, from which it was almost impossible to escape.

In her ability to unearth the social shifts embedded in intimate domestic history, Wills often recalls Lorna Sage’s unforgettable memoir Bad Blood, another tale full of rebellious pregnant girls. Like Sage, she is deft at unpicking lies, evasions and gaps in the record, grasping that these things have political as well as private meaning. Both women understand how trauma might be inherited, reduplicating through the generations, leaving a stain you have to work to interpret.

“I learn from these stories,” Wills writes of her mother, “about the culture of silence into which she was inducted, and about how information was withheld and knowledge circulated, particularly between women … By keeping and selectively sharing secrets women conspired to retain some autonomy, even agency, in communities in which they had little choice over what happened to them.”

But it wasn’t just the women who got damaged. The strange thing about Molly’s refusal to let Jackie marry is that it meant she lost her son, too. When Lily went to Bessborough he moved to England, where he vanished into an itinerant and undocumented underclass of Irish migrants, who worked on the roads and building sites or as seasonal agricultural labourers. In the moving final section of Missing Persons, Wills attempts to find Jackie, or at least to understand what his invisible life might have involved, day after freezing day, year after backbreaking year.

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This is a short, very personal book, but it is also an act of fairly radical reframing. The missing are the people pushed to the margins by a ruthless culture of sexual shaming. By placing them at the centre of her story, Wills simultaneously recalibrates what it means to be Irish. “The most representative thing about my family,” she writes, “was not the small farm, the nightly saying of the Rosary, or the close community of neighbours … but the fact that most of its members lived elsewhere. Perhaps this is the biggest Irish secret. The typical Irish family was not at home.”

I couldn’t read those lines without thinking of my own family. My grandmother grew up on a farm in Carlow. Like Molly, she was one of 13. She came to London before the second world war, married an Irishman and by the time I was born was settled in Harrow, with a sister nearby. Like Wills’s mother, she passed on a legacy of family stories, ghoulish and oddly truncated. They stuck up like sore thumbs, anecdotal and unattached, drawing you into a darker, more ambiguous history. Her husband was struck dumb as a boy after seeing his republican father chased by the Black and Tans. A sister had a baby out of wedlock, who died of starvation in a Catholic children’s home in England.

Until I read this book, I thought the inconclusive nature of these stories, their multiple gaps, was evidence of being inauthentically Irish, a plastic Paddy, not home often enough to have heard the full story. The reparative quality of Wills’s work, at least for me, is to reframe that sense of illegitimacy as the definitive article, an inheritance just as true in its way as the bottle of Lourdes water or the family farm.

Missing Persons must have been a very difficult book to write, for certainly it is difficult to read. This is not due to any defects of style or execution – it is an expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist. The difficulty for the reader is in struggling to absorb the pain and pity of the story, or stories, which it relates.

All families nurse guilty secrets, secret sorrows, as Clair Wills more than once acknowledges. Most of us are content to leave such matters undisturbed; not so Wills, who, with fortitude and much honest misgiving, puts on private trial a family, a generation and, indeed, an entire people and finds them guilty. She refrains, however, from condemnation. That is not her purpose.

Wills, a professor of English literature at Cambridge, has written numerous highly regarded books on Irish history and society. Although she grew up in London, her family on her mother’s side had its roots deep in Ireland, in an area of West Cork north of the town of Ballydehob. There, on a small, isolated farm, her grandmother lived into old age after her husband’s early death, watching her children emigrate, not to America, as most Irish people did in previous centuries, but to England, where they found jobs “nursing in psychiatric hospitals, labouring on farms, and building the motorways and power stations of England’s postwar boom”.

Each summer throughout their childhoods, Wills and her three sisters were taken for a holiday on their granny’s farm. The accommodation was basic: there were only two bedrooms, the one where the old woman and the girls slept together, and the “good” one that was reserved for the parents. “By the early 1970s the small-farm economy had decisively failed, but my grandmother … had no option but to keep living inside a world that had no future. Their lives outlasted their livelihoods.” All the same, magic attached to the place, in the eyes of the young.

Behind the idyll, however, a darker reality was hidden away in orphanages, in mother-and-baby homes, in so-called “industrial schools”, and in the infamous Magdalene Laundries. These institutions were funded, grudgingly, by the state and run, harshly, by the religious orders. The statistics are well known but still they shock. As Wills reminds us, between Irish independence and 1998, the mother-and-baby homes held, at the lowest estimate, “56,000 unmarried mothers, ranging from 12-year-old girls to women in their forties, and at least 57,000 babies and small children”.

In 2014 at one of these institutions, in Tuam, County Galway, run by the Bon Secours nuns, the remains of nearly 800 babies and young children were recovered from a disused septic tank, following research by a tireless and courageous local historian, Catherine Corless. Many of the children had died of malnutrition. A government commission set up to investigate the deaths concluded that the homes “did not save the lives of ‘illegitimate’ children; in fact, they appear to have significantly reduced the prospects of survival”.

Wills gives life, if that is what to call it, to these horrendous statistics. At some point, she cannot remember precisely when, she discovered that her mother’s brother Jackie, who was living on the farm with his mother, had impregnated a young neighbour by the name of Lily. Lily’s family was even less well off than Jackie’s; also, she had a “withered arm” and was therefore “poor stock”, so that marriage was out of the question.

Wills learned that Lily had her baby, named Mary, that Mary was consigned to an orphanage and later an industrial school, that when she grew up “she went to England to train as a nurse, that she became pregnant by an Indian doctor, that she went to India to meet the family and was rejected by them, and that she killed herself in 1980”. As Philip Larkin has it in This Be the Verse, “Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf.”

As Wills dug deeper into her family’s history, she made other, startling discoveries – Jackie’s betrayal of Lily was not by any means the only secret her grandmother guarded to the grave.

The great famine of the 1840s– in which a million people died and a million emigrated – effectively destroyed the old, half-pagan Ireland celebrated by Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory. With so much of the peasantry wiped out, the petit bourgeoisie came to full power, and with it rose the “modern” Irish Catholic church. As Wills writes: “The rosary, novenas, devotion to the sacred heart and the immaculate conception, candles, vestments, incense, beads, scapulars, medals, missals: all the paraphernalia that we associate with old-timey Catholicism was introduced in the 1860s and 1870s, as a way of capturing the imagination of the people – and policing their behaviour.”

This was not the church of Jesus but of St Paul: severe, male-dominated, pleasure-hating, and terrified by what it saw as the sinful power of the female, which must be suppressed or at least strictly controlled. In the new, “respectable” Ireland of the shopkeepers, the farmers and the priests, sex outside marriage was, as Wills writes, “codified as a sin, for which women must atone in a penitentiary regime”.

In the “new” Ireland, families became “practised at not seeing what they could see, and not knowing what they knew”. A Faustian pact was sealed between family, church and state, and the cult of secrecy was “bureaucratised”. And as under all totalitarian regimes, people – women and babies – went missing, by the tens, perhaps the hundreds, of thousands. This was a collective crime for which Ireland has still not been brought to full public trial. Should it ever be, Wills will make a powerful witness for the prosecution.

• Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply