Early Life
McGrath was born in Ealing, London to an Irish mother and a Nigerian father. According to Donald McRae, his father disappeared soon after his conception, while his mother, Betty McGrath, gave him up for fostering when he was four weeks old: terrified that her father would find out she had become pregnant outside marriage and in an interracial relationship, she travelled in secret to London to have her child, who was considered illegitimate.
When he was 5 years of age, one of the daughters of the family he had been fostered by came to Betty to say they couldn't control him. At that stage his mother had him back for a number of days before having to put him into an orphanage. Despite being Paul McGrath on his birth cert, the admission form required the name of the father, hence he was known as Paul Nwobilo for a time. He was brought up in a number of orphanages in Dublin but had regular visits from his mother, as well as his sister, up until the time he left.
Read more about this topic: Paul Mc Grath (footballer)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. It is the feeling early humans must have experienced when the firelight first overcame the darkness of the cave. It is the communal cooking pot, the Street, all over again. It is our need to know we are not alone.”
—Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)