Light a Penny Candle

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘No, I’m not busy, child,’ said Eileen.

  ‘It’s just that, I don’t know how to say it, but, you know, there wouldn’t be any danger, could there, that my father is dead?’

  ‘Dead? Oh, God forbid it should be true – what makes you say that, child? Where did you get such an idea?’

  Elizabeth produced a large envelope with a little sticker on it saying ‘Mother’s letters’. There were over fifty letters, each with the date they had arrived. She laid them out, picking up one from August 1943.

  This is the last time Mother said anything about Father. She says he was upset because of women striking for equal pay with men, that they shouldn’t do that when there’s a war on. And then not ever again. Not even at Christmas. She doesn’t say Father sends his love. She doesn’t say anything about his ARP work. …’ Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Do you think something’s happened and she’s protecting me?’

  Eileen rocked her in her arms, the soothing words and the denials, the positive statements tumbling out. Of course he was fine, of course they’d have heard, of course they would, it was that things had changed so much in England, and since Mother was going out to work she now had a much broader life and she didn’t just write about home. And men were hopeless at writing letters, sure just look at Uncle Sean now, he was most concerned to know how Maureen was getting on up in Dublin, but did he ever put pen to paper to write to her? Never. And then people don’t always keep mentioning the same things, after all when Eileen wrote to Sean she often made no mention of his father. …

  It had slipped out.

  ‘Do you write to Sean? Oh, I didn’t know. Where is he?’

  ‘He’s in Africa, he’s grand, he’s got a lovely English friend called Gerry Sparks. He often asks after you in his letters … now to go back to you and your worries. We’ll go and ring up home for you on your birthday. We’ll go into the shop tomorrow night and make a three-minute call. We’ll even book it tonight. And you can tell them that it’s their big, fourteen-year-old girl talking. How about that?’

  ‘Will it be very expensive?’ Elizabeth wondered.

  ‘Not at all, and isn’t it a birthday?’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Elizabeth, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand and her nose on a sleeve.

  ‘Oh, Elizabeth, there’s just one thing. …’

  ‘I know, Auntie Eileen, they’re your business, the letters to Sean. I know.’

  The next letter that came said that Sean and Gerry had left North Africa. They had been in the Anzio landings and now were well into Italy. Sean wrote that the Italian countryside was beautiful and bits of it would remind you of County Wicklow. There was even less life in his words and he wished for the fighting to end. He was glad that everything was well at home. Gerry’s mum had written about how you wouldn’t recognise Liverpool after all the raids. It was strange to think that nothing had happened in Ireland. He wrote that they might well see Rome. When he thought of all he had learned about the Holy City at the Brothers’ and now he was going to see it! He was telling Gerry about it but Gerry hadn’t heard of anything and didn’t know about the Vatican and St Peter’s. He’d write a letter from Rome, a proper letter and Mam could take it down to Brother John and show him that a boy didn’t need a Leaving Certificate to get to the Holy City.

  But Sean and Gerry didn’t get to the Holy City with the rest of the allies. A minefield in the Italian countryside that looked a bit like County Wicklow took both legs off Gerry Sparks from Liverpool, aged twenty-one; and twenty yards away killed outright his friend Sean O’Connor from Kilgarret who still had four months to go before he was twenty-one.

  Private S. O’Connor had listed his address as the small terraced house in Liverpool where Amy Sparks received the news. She sat in her dark kitchen and thought of her only son. She read the telegram over and over again, thinking that she should react more. Then she prepared herself to tell the mother of Gerry’s mate that Sean O’Connor would not be coming back to Kilgarret.

  The call came through to the shop, and Eileen took it in her little eyrie. She listened without tears as Mrs Sparks explained. She waited calmly until the sobbing of the woman she had never met ceased. She sympathised in a low voice over Gerry, she said she was glad to hear that he would recover. She agreed that it was a blessing that Sean had been killed outright, but that it was great that Mrs Sparks would be able to look after Gerry.

  ‘You sound such a wonderful woman,’ Amy Sparks sobbed. ‘Sean always did say “My Mam is grand”. That’s what he called you, grand.’

  ‘He didn’t mean it in the English sense, like a grand lady,’ said Eileen. ‘I was at school in England, I remember it was used differently.’

  ‘Perhaps, if you ever came over to see your old school, perhaps you could come and stay with me. Perhaps you could come and see Gerry when they bring him back. …’ The longing in her voice was clear. ‘There’d be no restrictions on you travelling.’

  Eileen didn’t even pause.

  ‘I’ll come very soon. If Gerry is coming back the week after next I’ll come too.’ She heard Amy Sparks gasp down the telephone. ‘If there had been a funeral for Sean I’d have come.’

  For some reason that she couldn’t explain to herself afterwards, Eileen didn’t tell anyone for four days. In that time she went mechanically around her daily jobs, doing them with almost superhuman energy. It was as if she had made up a game with rules: she mustn’t cry. If she let herself go and cried it would be worse for Sean. She had to be strong. Otherwise his whole life had no meaning, going out to that terrible place and being blown up. It would just be meaningless if people at home just wept great tears for him.

  She was very methodical. She left Peggy a great list of things to do; she arranged for Eamonn to work in the shop. She extracted a promise from Donal that he would rest and keep warm. She arranged for Maureen to come to Dunlaoghaire and meet her in a hotel.

  Then she told them why she was going to be away.

  She told Sean on a sunny June evening. She sat on an upturned drum and told him that their son was dead. She told him of Gerry and how his legs were gone and of the telephone call from his mother. She talked about the countryside in Italy and how they had been on the way to Rome. The noises of the shop came up from time to time as Sean tried to take it in.

  They never touched each other or held each other as she spoke of the telegram that had come to the house in Liverpool, and of the details that would follow later about the grave. She spoke the way Amy Sparks had done, in slightly halting sentences about how it had been very quick, and Sean must have known nothing.

  Then she listened. She listened while he ranted, she listened, still sitting on the upturned drum, while he sobbed. She couldn’t hear what he said into his big blue handkerchief. She waited while the sobbing ended and was replaced by sighs.

  ‘Would you like me to come to Liverpool with you? It’s a kind of pilgrimage, isn’t it? A sort of funeral?’

  She looked at him gratefully. He had understood, after all.

  ‘No, he’d prefer you to be here.’

  And then she called the children together and told them their brother was dead. She made the telling full of words like ‘peaceful’ and ‘heaven’ and ‘what he wanted to do’. She used words like ‘brave’ and ‘strong’ and ‘proud’… then she said that they could help her and help Sean by being very strong.

  The tears were coursing down Elizabeth’s face and Aisling’s was working in disbelief. He couldn’t be. … How did you. … It’s not fair. … Maybe. … What if. … Then she ran out of words and cried on Elizabeth’s shoulder and Elizabeth patted her head and said that they must be brave. Eamonn rushed back to the shop, his big innocent face stained and red. Donal protested that Sean couldn’t be happy in heaven, he hadn’t intended to go there, it was the bloody Germans and Italians that had sent him there. He had never said the word bloody before.

  And Eileen told Maureen in the chilly lounge of a Dunl
aoghaire hotel, where Maureen cried like a baby and rocked backwards and forwards in Eileen’s arms until the manageress came and asked would they like to go somewhere more private. So they walked up and down the pier for two hours while Maureen cried while she thought of all the things that Sean would never do.

  Then the pilgrimage began.

  It passed in a blur; the rubble in the streets of Liverpool, the blackout, the queues outside every shop. There was the visit to the hospital, where Gerry had cried. She had been very strong and she had smiled. Then she had asked a young priest with an Irish accent to say a mass for Sean. It was at seven in the morning and Amy Sparks had been there. Eileen had worn her black hat and gloves and carried a bunch of flowers which she was going to leave in the church. It was as near as she could manage to a wreath.

  But she cried as she sat on the boat back to Ireland and the tears ran down her face while she made no attempt to wipe them away. Her coat was stained with them as she sat looking out to the dark sea and crying at the waste. She stood up, the tears still falling and her shoulders heaving and walked to the rail of the ship. As she held onto the bar, her hat was whipped away by the night wind. It flew up in the air, hit the deck and was borne off. But the other passengers saw that the handsome woman in the black coat didn’t even seem to notice it had gone. She was saying something over and over again. Praying, possibly.

  PART TWO

  1945–1954

  VI

  VIOLET HAD NEVER understood why they had agreed to Elizabeth finishing her summer term at that convent school. It meant she missed VE Day; she missed all the celebrations, the turning on of lights, the tearing down of the blackout curtains and the scenes of wild excitement, where American soldiers swung passing girls into crazy dances, where crowds marched back and forth up Regent Street and round Piccadilly mad with happiness, hooting on car horns and singing ‘Bless ’Em All’ with tears running down their faces. It had been a heady day, but Violet had felt very left out. She didn’t have a man with a kit-bag coming home triumphantly with tales of battles won; she had George, moodier and more nervy than ever. He had taken now to muttering to himself about fellows with medals and ribbons coming back to civvy street for promotion and praise. She had no daughter to clutch proudly to herself like other women had; nobody she could hold and urge to remember this day for the rest of her life. Her daughter was finishing some exam and singing in a concert carrying an image of the Virgin Mary and wouldn’t be able to travel until the holidays – or that’s what Eileen’s letter had seemed to say. Violet hoped with a great sigh that they had not done the wrong thing in sending Elizabeth away for the duration.

  Her own work in the munitions factory was over now. There had been a chance to work in a tobacco factory – so great was the shortage of cigarettes that there were unheard-of working conditions now, with shifts around the clock. But Violet didn’t want to get involved. It was one thing doing important war work, which had to be done; it was another sitting at a factory bench making cigarettes with hundreds of factory workers. A few of the girls from the munitions factory said they would try it – anything was better than sitting around at home all day, or standing in never-ending queues. But Violet did not agree. After all those years of early-morning buses and late-night buses; of standing in whatever the weather and of bending low and straining to see … she thought she deserved a rest.

  Anyway, her fifteen-year-old daughter was coming home.

  Anyway, her friend, Mr Elton – Harry – said that she should pamper herself a bit. Harry Elton knew instinctively how women felt at the end of this long war. They felt dull and grey and drab and they needed a little … well, pampering. Mr Elton had been marvellous about getting silly little things, like small bags of sugar and a few ounces of knitting wool. She had been a little worried when he had got her four pairs of silk stockings. To accept a pair of silk stockings meant you had to give something in return, however small. But Harry Elton had laughed and told Violet he only wanted to see her smile. So she had taken them and told George that everyone in the factory had been given stockings as a bonus.

  Everyone had been given a month’s notice in the ARP on 1 May, but George seemed reluctant to accept it. He still went around to the Wardens’ Post and the First Aid Post, and so did one or two of the others. Together they shook their heads over the situation. Irresponsible decisions like closing the Tube stations at night! Suppose it happened again? How were people to trust the Germans – how could anyone trust anyone in the war? So long had George worried and so often had he muttered that Violet had begun to wonder whether he were right. After all, he had been out there at night. Perhaps he did know what he was talking about.

  ‘Silly old buffers – not your husband, mind – but those folk who don’t want to believe it’s over,’ Harry Elton had said. ‘Can’t bear to think that it’s all behind us and the fun and laughter are all ahead. …’

  Violet always felt better when she talked to Harry Elton; he had visited the munitions factory a lot – he was something to do with installing radios and loudspeakers for them all to hear Music While You Work. And then he had had something to do with organising transport. Always something new, something different. Harry Elton had nothing but praise for the brave boys in the forces, he didn’t run them down like George did. He didn’t complain, or make excuses about why he wasn’t at the front; he just followed their progress all the time as if he were cheering on his local football team. Harry Elton made everyone feel good. Violet was pleased that he liked her so much.

  There was so much noise and bustle at Euston that Elizabeth was momentarily worried that something was wrong. What, she wondered, could have gathered so many people together? But then, she had thought that at Crewe, too, and it was only the normal business of a big railway station. All around there were greetings and welcomings. People stood in groups, waving to a young couple who were going off on honeymoon. The bride’s little hat was perched at a dangerous angle and she waved enthusiastically until she and the train were gone from view. Elizabeth paused and changed her suitcases to the other hand. She always liked looking at weddings; she and Aisling used to go to the church to observe the brides and comment on them, usually unfavourably, to each other. None of them had looked as, well, as ordinary as this little girl in her navy serge suit and her red and navy hat.

  Elizabeth was glad of the distraction as she walked towards the barrier. She was afraid. Afraid that they might not want her back, despite their letters. Afraid that she wouldn’t know what to say. Afraid that there might be nothing to say.

  She was apprehensive about the days and weeks ahead. Back in Kilgarret they had seen the newsreels showing some of the blitz in London, but the reality was still quite different. Here it looked as if everything had been destroyed. She had seen from the train, particularly during the last, halting approaches to Euston, whole blocks with wooden planks nailed across windows. Twice she had been able to read the words ‘Danger – Unexploded Bomb’, which had made her heart leap; but the other passengers had said it didn’t mean much, just that the authorities were still working on clearing the site. They seemed so unconcerned.

  She walked up the platform with the crowd, wondering which side Mother would be. Would she be pressed up against the railings, or standing on a porter’s trolley peering down? Perhaps she was late? Suppose Mother wasn’t there – should she go home, back to Clarence Gardens? Or wait? Perhaps she should wait a while and see.

  She smiled at her silliness, and her smile broadened as she imagined what Aunt Eileen would say. ‘Always facing a thousand worries, my poor Elizabeth, long before one has come on the horizon.’ She had added that the perfect state of mind was half-way between Aisling and Elizabeth; Aisling never saw worries or responsibilities even when she was surrounded by them. A perfect state of mind … what a funny phrase. … And as she smiled, she met the eyes of a woman smiling back. A woman much younger than she remembered, with shining fair hair, and a smart suit and a little hat with three feather
s in it. The woman was waving and calling ‘Elizabeth!’ Her lipstick was very red. ‘Elizabeth!’

  It was Mother.

  She smelt lovely as they hugged each other awkwardly, though some of the powder from her cheeks brushed off on to Elizabeth, who couldn’t say anything for a while.

  ‘You look like an advertisement, Mother, you look so young and … everything,’ she managed at last. ‘I thought you’d have got different.’

  Violet had been going to say that she could hardly believe she had a grown-up daughter – a daughter with a waist and a small bosom; a tall girl instead of a trembling ten-year-old … but she was so taken aback by the compliment to herself that she tinkled a little laugh and said the first thing that came into her head. Sadly, it was a negative thing.

  ‘Oh, darling, what a nonsense, and what have they done to your hair, your lovely hair? Did they cut it with a knife and fork? We’ll have to see to that before we do anything else.’

  She picked up one of Elizabeth’s suitcases and they walked out into the late June sunshine. Election posters stared at them as Churchill and Attlee still sought the people’s support. Elizabeth was fascinated; in Kilgarret there had only been ordinary notices describing dances or fairs or pilgrimages. Not instructions to keep mum. …

  ‘Look, Mother,’ she giggled, pointing to a big picture. Violet looked, wondering what had happened. ‘Keep Mum … it’s a pun. …’ Her voice trailed away. ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ ‘Careless talk costs lives.’ Some of them flyblown and torn. Some newer and shiny. But none of them were new to Mother. Elizabeth could have spent hours reading them – what fun she would have had with Aisling. Together they would have memorised the phrases and recited them to each other. With a pang, Elizabeth realised she would be sleeping in a room by herself from now on and have no Aisling to talk to.