“Well, as we discussed on the phone,” she said, “Margaret Bowen passed away peacefully in her sleep five days ago. What money she had has gone to an animal charity. Apparently, Miss Bowen was very fond of animals, especially cats.” She paused and looked over at Mick. “The part that concerns you, Mr. McKenna, is right here in this folder.”
She extracted a sheaf of papers and shuffled them, then cleared her throat.
“Miss Bowen specified that I read her story to you personally, here in this office. I suppose she just wanted to make one hundred-per-cent-sure that she was heard. Afterwards, when you leave, the papers are yours to do with as you wish. Is that all right with you?”
Mick nodded and gripped Donna’s hand.
“Right, well then, we’ll begin.” She cleared her throat again and began to read. “‘I was born in Cork in 1940 . . .’”
She must be well used to this type of thing, Donna thought admiringly, because she doesn’t sound a bit self-conscious or nervous.
“‘My people were farmers, poor but not dirt-poor, like some others we knew. I was the eldest of seven children, a small enough family for the time. Some families we knew at the time had eleven, twelve, even thirteen children in them, so seven was nothing unusual. My father was a cold, hard, austere man. You could never talk to him about anything except the farm, not like the way children talk to their parents nowadays. Nowadays it’s all about the talking but back then it was different. He never drank a drop of alcohol (his parents had both been alcoholics) and he was deeply religious. We went to Mass every Sunday of course and we were made to go every morning in Lent, and woe betide us if we misbehaved in the church or tried to get out of going. We were also made say prayers every morning and evening and there were pictures of the Sacred Heart in nearly every room in the house. The one in the kitchen was the most important one because it had the light underneath it. My mother was always saying things like ‘Imagine talking like that in front of the Sacred Heart!’ or ‘I only hope and pray the Sacred Heart can’t see you now, coming home in that state in front of Him!’
The priest was the most important person in the town and, if you met him on the street, you’d have to step aside to let him pass and say ‘Good morning, Father’ or ‘Good evening, Father’. If you were a child, sometimes the priest mightn’t even acknowledge that you’d spoken, they were that high-up in the scheme of things. If you were to ask me today was religion shoved down our throats when we were younger, I would have to say yes. All the things that happened to me later in life have caused me to stop believing in the Catholic Church. I no longer go to Mass or take the Sacrament.
It’s harder to stop saying my prayers, because I’ve said my prayers every day of my life, even when I was in the place. Those prayers were to ask God to set me free but He never did. Maybe He only answers the prayers of the higher-ups, the rich and powerful, because when I was downtrodden and laid low in the place, He never spoke to me.
My mother, in her own way, was as distant and unloving as my father. The main thing I remember her constantly saying was that she’d never wanted children. If she had her time over again, she was always telling us, she’d go away and become a nun because nuns had no children and they lived to be a hundred because of it. It was because they had no stress, you see, and their bodies never had to bear the burden of children. Looking back, I suppose it wasn’t very flattering that she said this to us so often, but back then we just accepted it. I remember also the way my mother would sit out in the back garden every evening after dinner and have a smoke of her pipe (her own mother, my grandmother, had always smoked a pipe too), the chickens clucking away around her feet and the old donkey coming over for a nose. She’d sit for hours just thinking, smoking her foul-smelling pipe and staring into space, and we weren’t allowed to come near her because this was her private time for regretting the choices she’d made. She’d tell us that straight out, in case we were ever in any doubt. I loved my mother, despite how cold she was and how often she pushed me away. As the eldest, I think I was a disappointment to her. There were definitely other kids in the family she preferred to me. It always cut me to the quick when I saw her favouring others, which happened frequently. Even though she had a hard life – having to cook, clean and wash for a husband and seven children all very close to one another in age is no joke – I can’t feel sorry for her because of what she let happen to me later.
When a baby sister came along who was years younger than me – nearly ten years younger – I finally felt like I had someone to love. I lavished all my love and care on this one tiny little human being. My mother didn’t mind at all that I monopolised the new baby because she had no time to mind her herself. She didn’t want to either. I think now that maybe she resented the new baby because it was taking her back to square one. She’d thought that she was finished with all that, the nappies and the bottles and the sleepless nights, but now she was having to start again from scratch and she was disgusted. She could hardly stand to look at the child. It just represented more housework and drudgery to her.
I suppose that a psychologist today would say that I was so starved of love that I focused all my attention on this new baby sister. Now, all these years later, she doesn’t know anything about my existence. That’s how good and thorough a job they did of erasing me from the family tree. That’s one thing I can never forgive my parents for. They denied me and my sister the chance of a proper relationship, a friendship. My little sister will never know how much I loved her, or even that I existed.’”
Mick was gripping Donna’s hand so hard now that she was wincing.
Aideen Quinlan paused for a minute, cleared her throat and gave a little cough before taking a sip from a glass of water that sat on her desk.
“‘When I met Danny in 1957,’” she went on, “‘I suppose that what happened was almost inevitable. He was so handsome, so charming and funny that I was probably in love with him by the end of our first meeting at a local dance. I’d literally never met anyone like him in my entire life which, up to that point, had been extremely sheltered. My parents hadn’t wanted me to go this dance and, if they’d known what was going to happen as a result of my going there, they’d have stopped me from attending. I think I got pregnant during our first sexual encounter. I knew about babies from things I’d seen on the farm and heard from friends at school, who always seemed to know much more than me about that kind of thing. I knew how they got in (the babies, I mean), and I knew how they were supposed to get out, although that thought in particular terrified me. After all, how could something as big and solid as a baby pass through an opening as small as, well, as a woman’s front bits? I had seen calves and piglets born on the farm, but I was a human being. Surely it was different for human females than for animals? Anyway, I couldn’t understand how this part of the process was going to work at all. I suppose I was an awful eejit, really, and as green as the grass.
Time passed, anyway, and Danny went back to England, where he was working as a roofer and making good money out of it. He’d only been back in Ireland on a sort of extended holiday, which lasted one whole summer. He was as Irish as I was, only he left Cork to go to England when he finished school because he’d heard that there were good pickings there. London was still rebuilding itself after the war and labourers could make a fortune amongst the ruins and the rubble. I’d been too afraid to tell Danny – or anyone – about the baby, so I let him go off all happy because we’d had such a wonderful time together and he had lots of lovely memories to look back on.
Bully for him, I hear you say, and you’re right. My biggest regret in this whole thing is that I didn’t tell him in person that I was in trouble while he was still in Ireland. God knows how things might have turned out then. He might have married me, and I could have kept my baby and maybe we could even have had one or two more, who knows? But there’s no point in dwelling on the ‘what ifs’. Life is full of them and they never get you anywhere. Anyway, it only upsets me to think about what-
might-have-been. I try not to do it too often but I’m only human after all.
A letter came for me from London about a month after Danny had left. I’ve kept it till this day, although now it’s so crumpled from the constant readings and re-readings that you can hardly see the words on it any more. It’s newsy and chatty and full of all the things he’d been doing and the places and people he’d been seeing, and I was so jealous of him being over there, meeting new people, happy and busy and without me, that I wanted to die.
Instead, I was stuck at home in Cork, growing more and more miserable by the day. When I wasn’t helping out on the farm, I’d go for long walks by the river and think about my Danny and cry. If it was raining, my tears would mingle with the rain until I felt like I was all water. I even thought about drowning myself a time or two, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too afraid of what it would be like. Anyway, killing yourself is the worst sin you can commit. The thought of being locked away from the face of God for all eternity was too much, too big for a young girl of my age to contemplate. I wasn’t yet twenty, much too young to die.
And the baby inside me continued to grow. The first two or three months, nothing much happened to me except that I felt noticeably more tired than usual and I seemed to have lost my appetite. After the third month, however, things changed considerably. I was putting on weight which I tried to hide by wearing big jumpers. I remember I had a green one, scratchy and with a huge cowl-neck that wasn’t fashionable at all (the kids today wouldn’t be seen dead in it), but at least it hid the bump. There was also a brown one I liked. I had more energy during this time, had a huge appetite and constantly craved citrussy-tasting things like oranges or orange-and-lemon sucky sweets.
Was I worried about what would happen when the baby was due to come out? Yes and no. During the day, I seemed to have huge quantities of denial at my fingertips that I could comfortably hide in but, in the night, lying in my narrow bunk bed with my four younger sisters in the same room with me, was when I feared the future. I’d lie awake terrified, thinking about it, dreading the day of reckoning and panicking that every little twinge I felt was the onset of early labour. I longed for Danny but he seemed to be very far away from me now, almost as if he’d never happened. He was like a dream I’d had, but the baby inside me was no dream. I managed to keep my pregnancy concealed for more than eight months. How can they not notice, I asked myself every day, how can they not see what should be obvious to everyone? Are they that blind, that oblivious, that uncaring? My mother said afterwards that she’d noticed, that she’d known, but that she was just waiting the whole time for me to ‘get the boat to England’ and do away with the baby like another girl in the town was supposed to have done. Abortion wouldn’t be legalised in England for another decade or two but there were certain people you could go to if you were in trouble. All you needed was an introduction from someone else and a few quid. I wouldn’t have had a clue myself how to go about such a thing, even if I’d wanted to. I felt sick when my mother said what she said. You’d have been waiting a long time, I wanted to scream at her, for me to do that.
I only told them in the end because things were happening in my body and it was clear that something even bigger was going to happen soon. In the end, it was literally only the fear of that ‘something bigger’ that forced me to reveal my carefully guarded secret. My one consolation was that it was much too late in the pregnancy for them to make me take that dreaded ‘boat to England’ themselves. Maybe that, as well as the sick fear of telling such cold, puritanical angry people about something so personal, so intimate, something created out of love, was the reason I had hugged my secret to myself for so long. In any case, once the genie was out of the bottle, there was no squashing it back in. Why were they always so angry, my parents? It was a question I often asked myself. I understood that their lives – in particular my mother’s – hadn’t worked out the way they’d expected them to, but did that give them the right to take it out for ever after on their children? Back then, of course, children weren’t valued as individuals the way they are today – they were only more mouths to feed. They got the family doctor, a sharp-faced, old-womanish little man with a thin, reedy, high-pitched voice, to come to the house and confirm that there was indeed a baby. Even as he was roughly handling my abdomen, part of me was still genuinely expecting him to say that it was all rubbish, nonsense, all in my imagination, there was nothing there at all. But it was much too late for that. My mother did what she always did during a family crisis and, after a few cutting remarks as to my character and what she said about ‘the boat to England’, she disappeared off upstairs, pleading one of her sudden conveniently timed ‘indispositions’. She left me alone with my father, something I find it hard to forgive her for because she knew full well what he was like. I think she didn’t care, as long as he was directing his anger at us kids and not at her. He shot hard, cold nasty questions at me, such as who the father was and when and where did it happen and all that. As soon as I could, I escaped off to bed, relieved that he hadn’t shown me the expected violence. He could have battered me, but he must have been too shocked to react in his usual way. Believe me when I say I got off lightly that night. Climbing into my bunk bed in the bitter cold of a January night, I fell into a dead sleep.
When I awoke the following morning, it was to a vastly different world to the one I remembered. It might sound clichéd to say that nothing was ever the same again, but that’s really how it was.
It was after ten o’clock, for one thing. I’d slept in! I would normally have been up and about doing my jobs on the farm hours before. I wondered why the rest of them hadn’t called me. Not only that but, when I dressed and went downstairs, I noticed two things immediately. There was a brown suitcase standing packed by the front door, and my younger siblings were nowhere to be seen. My parents wouldn’t tell me where they’d all vanished to, or whose the suitcase was. They just told me to eat my breakfast, which I did. I was filled with trepidation, but I still didn’t realise the seriousness and extent of my predicament. If I had, I might have given suicide a second hearing.
When I’d finished eating my porridge, all lumpy now from having been sitting on the hob since seven o’clock that morning when my mother had made it, there was a knock on the door. It was the parish priest, who was a great friend of the doctor who’d called to the house the night before.
‘Hurry up now and get your hat and coat on,’ my mother urged me, as she bustled round making tea for the priest.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked her, frantic now, but she ignored me.
When I was dressed in my coat and hat, my father came in from the farm and had a quick muttered exchange with the priest. My father put the brown packed suitcase in the back of the priest’s car. And that was it. Without a word of love, encouragement or even goodbye, without a word even about when we might see each other again, my mother pushed me into the passenger seat of the priest’s car and shut the door. The priest got in and started the car. It rolled away down the driveway.
I was too afraid to look back at my parents. What if they weren’t waving? Somehow I knew they wouldn’t be. What if they weren’t even still there at all but had gone back about their business? I’d be even more crushed than I was at present. I didn’t chance it in the end. I was too afraid of what I would or wouldn’t see.
I asked the priest a few times where we were going but he kept absolutely silent for the whole journey so, eventually, I fell silent too. After about two hours of driving, he stopped at a café and bought two sandwiches and two cups of tea in plastic cups. He wordlessly gave me one of the sandwiches and one of the teas. The sandwich was just plain ham and a bit chewy but I was hungry so it hit the spot, and I was very glad of the hot sweet tea.
When we started driving again, I noticed that more and more of the road signs were saying ‘Dublin.’ Were we going to Dublin? I knew by now that my parents were sending me somewhere and that it was to do with me telling them about
the baby, but I still had no idea where it was or what it would entail for me and my child. I wouldn’t be long finding out. About five hours after we’d left Cork and we’d driven through what was unmistakably Dublin because of all the signposts, the priest’s car made its way up the long winding driveway of a huge, imposing red-brick building, standing in its own private grounds, which I knew instinctively was an institution of some kind. The moment I saw it looming over me like something out of a nightmare will be imprinted on my mind for ever. The priest indicated to me with a jerk of his head that I should get out. I did so and took my suitcase from him when he handed it to me. Nervously, I followed him up the steps to the huge brown front door that had been waxed to within an inch of its life. The heavy knocker too was gleaming with polish. Even outside in the fresh air you could smell the wax polish.
A nun in a long black habit, complete with one of the old-fashioned wimples, came to the door in answer to the priest’s knock. She and the priest had a whispered conversation, clearly not intended for my ears. Then, to my astonishment, the priest descended the steps, got back into his car and drove off without so much as a word to me or even a glance in my direction. He’d been cold and distant towards me and hadn’t spoken a single solitary syllable to me during the long journey, but he was my last link with my home and my family and I felt the panic rising up in my throat. Where was I? Would I be staying in this place with the huge brown door and the polished knocker? Were there more nuns here like this one who was looking me over coldly now like I was something unpleasant she’d stepped in?
From the moment I’d told my parents about the baby, my fate had been sealed. The nun told me sharply to follow her inside and, when that heavy brown door banged shut behind me, even without knowing yet what this strange place was and what it would come to mean for me, the noise it made already sounded to me like the clanging shut of a prison door.
Thirteen Stops Page 10
