by Honor Harlow
“It’s where the big shots live.”
“It is.”
“Were you frightened out on the street?”
“A bit when it started getting a small bit dark.”
“I would be too,” Úna said.
“And then a bunch of boys came along and started calling me names.”
“What did you do, Kait?”
“I told them to stop and that’s when Richard Martin hit me.”
“I hated the guts out of that fellow and the other one he’s always with, Kevin Fitzgerald,” I said. Kevin was Loretta’s brother and that was what made me not like him.
“Ya I do too, but Jim Smith pushed him and said boys shouldn’t hit girls.”
“Was Jim Smith with the other lads?”
“Ya he was, but he told Richard he’d belt him if he hit me again.”
“Why didn’t you call Mary?”
“I didn’t cos she was working. Anyway, she came out with the bike when she was finished and told me to sit on the seat and we’d go home.”
“And only for that, you are going to marry him?” Úna asked surprised.
“No, he gave me his catapult when my leg got caught in the spokes.”
“That time or another time?” Úna wanted to know.
“That time. I was crying and wiping my face with my sleeve cos of Richard Martin and I forgot to keep my legs out, so I did, and one got caught in the spokes.”
“You twisted your leg. You could end up lame like Mick the Sticks,” Ev said.
“No, I got better quick cos Jim Smith gave me his catapult.”
“Who wants an old catapult?” Kait pretended she didn’t hear me say that.
“Jim Smith told me my leg would be really sore for a little while, then it would be a small bit sore and then get better.”
“Did it?”
“It did, really quick.”
Nan said to Nanny, “Isn’t it young she is to be falling in love?” Then she warned us about the woods near Cnocmaigh, where Queen Maeve lives. “A leanaí, be sure ye have salt in yer pockets when ye go gathering hazelnuts in that woods.”
“What for?” I asked.
“It’s a fairy wood and if the little rascals are up to devilment, they’ll take yer souls.”
“They will so they will. They took Mick the Sticks leg when he fell asleep under a tree,” Kait told us.
“A cailíní, ye that are young and well able to move about, will ye light a candle for the soul of my Jack?” Nan said.
“A course we will. The chapel is opened until it gets well dark.”
As we were leaving, Nan told us Nanny Ward found the stick in the barm breac.
“What does that mean?” Ev leaned close to Nan to hear what it meant.
“That she’ll be making a journey.”
“Devil the journey, I’ll be making if it’s not to the graveyard.”
“The barm breac doesn’t lie and you know that well.”
We left the nannas talking and ran down to the chapel. It was full of people going in and out the opened doors. I prayed and lit a candle for Mammy to get better and go upstairs with Daddy. I told God he had to make her better, because I wouldn’t be able to slope out and go with my pals if she was sleeping downstairs. She was sure to hear me opening the door, like the night of the storm when she heard the hens. The money on the candle was wasted because Mammy didn’t get better. I wasn’t able to go house to house with the turnip on Ducking Night.
A short while after Ducking Night, the Home Babies stopped coming to school. First, we thought they all had measles and were sick in bed, but they never came back. I asked Mammy if Mr Delaney knew what happened.
“He told me the Home got damaged during the storm and they had to close it.”
“Was it uprooted like the tree on Suileen Lane?”
“Mary, have a bit of sense, of course it wasn’t uprooted, it’s because the roof is collapsing.”
“Falling in?”
“That’s right.”
“Did the roof fall on top of the children and hurt them?” I said, thinking of the woman and the child, who the man on the news said were killed in Cavan during the storm.
“It didn’t, thank God.”
“And the babies, where are they gone?”
“You can be sure they are well cared for, and Mary, the less said about certain things the better.”
“Why?”
“Curiosity killed the cat, Mary.”
“But Mammy…”
“That’s enough out of you.”
Nan and Nanny were like Mr Delaney and knew everything that was happening in Drumbron and on top of that, they didn’t mind talking. They told us what happened to the roof in The Home.
“Nan, did ya know the roof of The Home got broken during the storm and all the Home Babies are gone.”
“Arrah musha, we might be getting old but if they think they’re codding people saying it was the broken roof that closed The Home, we’ll let them, mar dhea.”
“What was it closed for?”
“A visit late one evening closed it.”
“How did a visit close it, Nan?”
“The inspector took it into his head to pay a surprise visit and that is what got it shut down,” Nanny said.
“And the two other men he dragged along with him, Mary.”
“Was the inspector big like Cú Chulainn?”
“Why are you saying that, a girl?”
“The inspector dragged the two men, so he was big to be able to pull them along with him.”
“A grá mo croí, it’s a way of saying he got them to go against their will.”
Nan saw we still didn’t know what she meant. “He fooled the two men into going to The Home unbeknownst to the nuns.”
“What did it matter if the nuns knew the men were coming or not coming?” I asked.
“They didn’t have time to hide the sick craturs away like they did at the other times, when they knew the inspectors were coming.”
“What sick craturs?”
“The little children that weren’t right, even though they came into the world as healthy as you or me.”
Nanny Ward gave Nan a look and said, “Ná bé ag caint, tá na clasaí mór ar na páistí agus beal na more ar guid.”
“Off with ye now and keep yer mouths closed about what ye hear me say.”
“But where are the Home Babies now, Nanny?” I screamed and stamped my foot.
“Isn’t it you that’s got the temper. The children went to other Homes.”
“There’s no other Homes, only that one,” Úna, who knew everything, said.
“There is in other towns.”
“In other towns, are you sure?” Ev, who also knew everything, asked.
“I am. The nuns have Homes in different parts of the country.”
“Does that mean they are coming back when the roof is fixed?” I asked because I didn’t know anything.
“It doesn’t. They won’t be back, a leanbh.”
Liam was gone for good, like my little brother was gone with the babies with no names. I remembered the day in the toilets and how I had stopped Loretta mocking him. I was small then in first class and I didn’t know how to read or go to confession. Now I was big, in second class. I had a gang of friends and a cousin in Cavan but still no brother. Brigid had Liam for her brother. It wasn’t fair. I was starting to put a puss on when Nan Gormley said as though she was seeing inside me, “Arlene, when we love someone, they are always in our hearts.” Nan was right because even though I never saw Liam again, I think about him plenty of times.
Primary School 1969 – 1972
The years went by and we grew big, not knowing, nor caring, what life had in store for us. We threw ourselves into it each day with gusto and slept holding onto what had happened that day, our minds full of the adventures we had lived and dreaming of the ones to come. Our lives weren’t signposted by years but carved into our minds by the events taking place around us. After
the Big Storm, no body-pushing, tree-shaking, roof-raising, bins-scattering and shattering gusty winds could keep us inside looking out – like Hurricane Debbie had done. She, along with our First Holy Communion, was carved into our minds as one of the most remarkable signposts along our childhood.
Making our Confirmation was a pale imitation of our First Holy Communion. It lacked all the excitement and tingling anticipation of the happiest day of our lives. As we moved from class to class, we were taught by different nuns of different hues, but none ousted Sister Ignatius or Sister Kevin from our memories. We played with other children, even let them become part of our gang, but we never shared our hearts with them. Evelyn, Kait, Úna and I remained the best of friends while people and things around us were changing.
We went into third class. Our nun’s name was Sr Rita. She had a man’s face, but she didn’t get cross with anyone. Loretta and her pals were her favourites. They sat in the front desk, so the nun could smile at them and look at their lessons to see if they were right. Loretta knew 3x2 was six, but never learned that 3x3 was nine.
Sr Rita always asks her, “What is 3x2, Loretta?”
“Six, Sister.”
One time, Sr Rita asked her, “2x3, Loretta?” She said she didn’t know and when the nun prompted her, saying she did know, she answered, “Seven, Sister.”
Then one day, when I was in the middle of third class, Daddy stopped wearing his uniform. He hung the dark-blue jacket with the brass buttons at the back of the wardrobe and it disappeared from our lives. In the mornings, he came downstairs dressed in a suit, looking like a film star. The first morning I couldn’t stop staring at him. He put his hand on my head and ruffled my hair saying, “I’m still Daddy, pet, clothes don’t maketh man.”
When he was leaving for work, I followed him into the hall and watched as he picked up his hat and put it on his head. Daddy placed his first finger in the dent in the middle and the rest of them at one side. His thumb went on the other side. I called it his hilly cap, but he told me it was a trilby hat. As well as swapping his blue peaked cap for the hat, he used the car to go to work. The bike was in the hen house where the chickens used to be. The shed was empty. The hens were gone away like the Home Babies.
Even though Daddy changed his uniform for a suit, he didn’t change himself. In the evenings he still went playing cards in the parish hall and to train the under-16 GAA players. I wanted to go with him to the pitch. He told me it was better I didn’t because some nights he was out until bedtime. If I wasn’t at home until that late time of night, Mammy might worry. She had been very brónach, which Dr Kelly called depressed since President Kennedy’s assassination was shown on television. He was shot in Dallas, and Mammy kept talking about Jackie and how her lovely pink suit got ruined. Daddy didn’t give a sugar about the Kennedys. He had told me the Kennedy’s father was a criminal whose fortune came from bootlegging, which meant selling drink. He had no time for Rose Kennedy either, saying she was very ambitious for her sons but didn’t care one bit if her daughter was locked up. Mammy loved the Kennedys, though.
Before Christmas, when the news of President Kennedy’s assassination was shown on television, the brónach came on Mammy then and she didn’t want to get up from bed. She lost her appetite. When she didn’t want to watch Gay Byrne on television, Daddy and Mrs McLoughlin became worried. After much talk, serious looks from Daddy and nodding from the housekeeper, they decided to make up the room downstairs so Mammy would not be on her own upstairs. She could listen to the radio and to Mrs McLoughlin rattling about in the kitchen and see Batt when he came with the post.
For a good while, Mammy spent the whole time in the downstairs bedroom, looking at photos of the American President, Jackie, Caroline and John-John and wondering how they were coping. The photos of Jackie’s pink Chanel suit, covered in blood, caused her to burst out crying. Daddy didn’t know what to say to make her stop sobbing. She only got up when Mr Delaney called in to see her. Him and Terry Wogan on the radio, were the only people she wanted to listen to. And it was thanks to Mr Delaney she started to stop crying. He assured her that the White House staff had put bread soda and water on the dark spots on Jackie’s suit, saying it was the best for removing blood stains, even though he had heard his mother mention that red wine could do the trick too. She looked at him and said, “Oh John!” Daddy looked at the two of them, shook his head and headed for the door. When Daddy came home late at night, he crept upstairs to their room next to mine while she was asleep downstairs.
Mammy became less brónach with Mr Delaney’s visits and the magazines, full of pictures of the Kennedy family, that he brought her when he called to see her every evening. However, the day he bought the ones with Jackie, Caroline and John-John at the funeral was a bad day for Mammy. She said she would never wear pink again, but Mr Delaney warned her against doing such a thing.
“Dervla, you know pink is one of the best colours for dark-haired women. Assumpta Burke, you know the brunette woman, always wears pink and she is considered a real beauty.”
“Is that at Mass, John, she wears it?”
“At the golf-club, never misses a day. My mother is very fond of her.”
“I didn’t know you played golf, John.”
“I go there with my mother. I’d say you would make a great golfer, Dervla.”
“Why do you think that, John?”
“You’ve got the arms to swing a club, if anyone has them.”
They started talking about the golf course and the wonderful people who were members.
“Dervla, why don’t you come along with me and you’ll see for yourself what a fantastic crowd of people go there? The Annual Christmas Dinner Dance is on this Friday.”
“John, I couldn’t possibly go dancing so soon after Jack’s death. I don’t want to set people’s tongues wagging.”
“You are absolutely right, it would be very thoughtless of you.”
“I wish William was as understanding as you, John. He doesn’t know how difficult it is for me since Jack’s death.”
“Mrs Fitzgerald feels the same way as you do, Dervla.”
Mammy lifted her eyelids and looked at him with interest. “Why don’t you come along with me one of these days and have a chat with her and at the same you can try the coffee and give me your opinion on it.”
The evening of her first day at the club, she came home looking beautiful with shining eyes and a smile on her face, and told Daddy, “William, I felt so proud when John introduced me to the other members as Mrs Dervla Blake, the Superintendent’s wife. Mrs Fitzgerald was there, and she actually walked over to where I was standing and welcomed me to the club.”
After that, she was the club every day chatting to other women. Now she had a gang of pals that she went with. The golf course was a bit outside of town, so Mr Delaney drove Mammy to it. A while after Christmas she said to Daddy, “William, Mrs Fitzgerald drives herself in and out of town, so I was thinking you could teach me to drive the Mini.” Daddy agreed, but never found the time, so in the end it was Mr Delaney who taught my mother. Around town he was known to drive as slow and carefully as the hearse. His slow-motion pace might have been the reason Mammy was driving by summertime. During the holidays, she spent all her time at the golf club, and I played with my pals. We made picnics, went to the river, to the dump and to the sandhills near Barna Dearg where there was an old broken-down castle, as well as going up Clonthu Hill to see the nannas.
Mammy faded from my life like the warm, yellow brightness you see every morning in summertime that quietly turns into grey days and black evenings of the cold weather. She used to be standing in the light I woke up to. Her back bent over the Singer sewing machine greeted me when I rushed in the door from school. Her voice gave out to me for a hundred different things I did wrong. She made sure I said my prayers before I went to sleep. After she started playing golf, there was less of her about the house, like a candle in front of a statue that burns smaller and smaller.
&nbs
p; Daddy coming into my room and touching me on the shoulder, telling me it was time to get up for school was the start of Mammy not being around so much. Some mornings I would see her in the kitchen in her nightdress and housecoat making toast. Those days she saw me off to school, but it was always to Mrs McLoughlin’s house that I went to for dinner, that Mammy now called lunch, because she was in the golf course, lunching with her pals.
After school in the evening, it was Mrs McLoughlin’s voice I heard saying, “Mary, a girl, the door can be opened without you taking it off the hinges!” when I pushed the front door in. It was the housekeeper who picked up my school bag after I flung it on the stairs, in the hall, as I rushed into the kitchen to grab something to eat.
“You know it wouldn’t kill you to sit down at the table to eat that. You are like a dog with a bone!” she called after me as I galloped out the door carrying the ham and cheese sandwich she had made. “Where are you off to in such a hurry?” she’d ask knowing full well I was going to see Kait, Úna and Evelyn. At the beginning when I came home from school, Mrs McLoughlin would try to get me to do my lessons, but I explained to her that I didn’t need to do any.
“Are you sure you’re not making that up?”
“A course I’m not, Mrs McLoughlin. If there’s a knock on the classroom door, Sister Rita nods to me, meaning she wants me to continue telling the class what she was reading from her book and then she goes outside to speak to the person at the door.”
“Well, that’s hard to believe but you always get good marks so there might be truth in it,” she said smiling so I knew she believed me.
“With Sr Kevin in second class, we did the stories from The Old Testament. I knew the Seven Plagues and about Moses and how Abraham was going to kill his son to please God. And I know about Art O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell escaping from Dublin and getting frozen in the hills and the Statue of Kilkenny.”
“A pity you don’t learn how to put your schoolbag in the right place.”
“I will tomorrow, I promise.”
“You’d better or I might have a word with that cross God of the Old Testament about you throwing your schoolbag on the stairs.” But she was only codding because she was laughing and saying, “He knew how to punish people when they broke a rule.”
