At last she was at the pithead. There were makeshift lights swinging from hastily erected structures and men running around as if they had no idea at all about what they were supposed to be doing. Women were standing huddled together for warmth or comfort more likely, and she recognized one of them. ‘Mrs Brown, it’s me mam; she needs the doctor.’
The woman looked at the girl and the effort to wrench her mind away from the horror of the coalface to the exhausted child was clearly written on her face. For a moment she seemed not to know her; she had a man and two lads down there. ‘Yer mam?’ she managed at last. ‘Och Kate, the bairn’s no comin’,’ she said impatiently. ‘Look round ye, lassie. We’re dealin’ in death here. Away home, yer father’ll hae tae manage himself. He got her pregnant easy enough, let him be in at the end o’ it.’ She turned back to her vigil and then, conscious of the child still at her side, she relented. ‘Away and chap up Mrs Breen. She’ll no be here and she’s birthed more bairns than oor braw doctor.’
Kate stood for a moment looking at the woman’s back. She felt tears welling up again and desired nothing more than to submit to the luxury of being thirteen years old and to cry for her mammy, to be held in soft, warm arms, certainly not to have to face that three miles of dark fields and woods between the pit and her tumbledown home. Mam, she sobbed quietly and started once more to run – to run like a frightened hare back across the ground she had just covered so painfully. Her mother was in labour for the sixth time in thirteen years – not counting the miscarriages – and something was wrong. Kate was used to childbirth, the newspapers collected furtively for weeks and then spread on the old stained mattress, the neighbour women crowding in, glad that they were not lying in agony in that uncomfortable bed, ready to do what little they could to bring this new life into the world as easily as possible. They never sent for the doctor. His fee was minimal; but there was usually no way that Liam Kennedy could pay it – and why should he pay for something so natural as a woman’s Godgiven function; this act of giving birth. Kate remembered huddling in the big box bed with her brothers and sisters, trying to block out the sounds of her mother’s screams, soothing the frightened babies, telling them stories, crooning little songs. Tonight they were alone, well, Da was there, but he would be of little use what with Mam so bad and all the little ones there. When Kate had left, Da had been walking the floor with little Colm sobbing himself to sleep in his arms.
Mrs Breen. Mrs Breen. Kate turned and ran, her pains and fatigue forgotten. Behind her the desperate rescue work went on but she was already divorced from that tragedy and would never in the years to come be able to remember clearly anything at all about it.
Kate stumbled down the hill that led from the mine, reached what passed for a main street and turned left towards the miners’ rows. The road ran along the river and usually she stood stock still and let the sound of running water seduce her but tonight she hardly noticed it at all; past the doctor’s fancy big house with its beautiful garden – so much time, I’ve wasted so much time – and on to the foot of the village. Number six, that was Mrs Breen’s house and it looked deserted, drawn in on itself like a tortoise. Everywhere else there were open doors and light spilling out. Of course, Mrs Breen had lost all her family long ago, no need to alert her to the trouble at the pit. Kate leant on the door for a moment to get her breath; she had been running for ever and only the door stopped her legs from going on and on. Don’t sleep, she admonished herself and battered on the door as hard as she was able. What a puny battering the door received; there was no strength left in her tired little body.
I can’t wake her. Mammy will die for I’m useless. She picked up a stone that lay on the path and thumped it – with the strength of a dying moth – against the door, screaming and crying ‘Mrs Breen, Mrs Breen,’ and not hearing a sound except the silence from inside the house. And then the door opened and the old woman stood there like a witch, her black shawl pulled round her voluminous flannel nightgown.
‘Lassie, lassie, ye’ll hae the house doon aboot ma ears. What’s wrong?’
She bustled the slight, undernourished little girl into the kitchen assuring her that she could easily listen while she pulled on her drawers and her shoes. Kate poured out her story, be grudging every second that the old woman took; it was years before she fully appreciated how fast Mrs Breen had actually been.
*
‘Where is the doctor, lass? Did I not send you for the doctor?’ Liam Kennedy’s natural courtesy surfaced. ‘Sorry, Mrs Breen, but I’ve had to send for the doctor, Mary Kate’s been took terrible bad.’
Mary Kate was in labour – this looked to be the hardest yet – and he was almost out of his mind with worry but he would struggle to be polite to this neighbour, however Mrs Breen seemed not to hear him. Already she was over at the box bed where the slight figure with its huge distended stomach was struggling desperately to bring her child into the world.
Mary Kate gripped the old woman’s hand with desperate strength. ‘My Katie, Mrs Breen,’ she whispered through cracked bleeding lips, ‘send her to bed; ‘tis not a place for a wee lass.’
Mrs Breen smiled at her reassuringly but said nothing. She threw her shawls over the dilapidated old armchair and began issuing orders. ‘Liam, boil water’ – useless occupation but would keep him busy – ‘Kate, hen, ye’ll need tae help me wi’ Mammy. Where have ye put the cloots, Mary Kate?’ For weeks, Mary Kate would have been boiling and cutting up old sheets. ‘Kate, get the cloots frae ben the wardrobe, that’s a good lass.’
The labour went on for hours. The echoes of her mother’s screams never left Kate although on that awful night she was so numbed by fear and fatigue that she paid little attention to them. After a while she was completely anaesthetized, and although, for most of the night, her body did as it was bid, when her mother died she had dropped asleep by the bed. They left her there while Liam ran, at the old woman’s bidding, for the priest. Mary Kate would have wanted a priest.
Liam didn’t. All his life he had lived by the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church; he ate fish on a Friday when he could afford fish, he fasted before receiving Holy Communion on Sundays and holy days, he gave up everything he could think of – including the comforts of a sexual relationship – during Lent; in every way possible he tried to be a good Catholic. He had accepted every misfortune fate handed him, believing that his ‘reward would be great in heaven’, but this . . . this . . . Mary Kate lying there dead at the age of thirty-three . . .
‘Get away from her,’ he yelled at the boy, for that was really all the young priest was; ‘don’t prate about eternal life with me Mary Kate lying there in her own blood and me left with these babbies and Kate only thirteen . . .’ he choked on his tears and visibly tried to control himself, his hands clenched and shaking.
‘Now, now, my son,’ began the young priest, desperately trying to say and do the right thing; he could not allow this child of the church to lose his immortal soul, ‘you should have fetched me earlier but I have given her the last sacrament, Extreme Unction; Mary Kate is sleeping with the Lord.’
Liam, distraught, turned on him in a rage. ‘Get out of my house and take your extremes and your unctions with you. Eternal life; damn you and your kind for ever – it’s now she wants life. Now.’ His voice broke and he turned away from the priest, brushing aside the younger man’s arm as if he scarcely noticed it.
The old woman soothed the priest. ‘Away home with you, Father, and say your prayers. He’ll get over it, sure he will and be back to beg your pardon in a day or two.’ Gently but relentlessly she pushed the young man, who spent what was left of the night prostrate on the concrete floor of his little chapel begging for help, out of the door. Then she returned to work that she had had to do far too often in her life. Forgetting her seventy-five years she issued orders and instructions to the young man who stood bowed and helplessly weeping beside the bed and when he was incapable of responding she carried them out herself.
Liam eventually got the doctor and the equally overworked village undertaker. One hundred and nine men and boys had died in the pit, many others had been hideously injured and so, on the day that Mary Kate Kennedy was buried, mourners got mixed up and merely went from one grave to the next. What did it matter whether it was a boy born and bred in Dumfriesshire and his father and his father before him – fodder for the mines – or the wife of one of those Irish Catholics? Her man was a miner and miners all gave their wives far too many bairns, especially the Catholic ones. With any luck there would be some sister or auntie or grannie to come and help with the bairns for the women of the village who would normally have pitched in were all too busy mourning or nursing boys who would never walk again or husbands who would lie in the big box beds coughing their lives away.
Most of the vilage changed in the next few months for the miners’ rows needed working miners and if the workers were dead, well then their widows would have to throw themselves on the mercy of relatives for the but n’ bens were needed for able bodied men. More Irish flooded in but Liam did not hold out the hand of fellowship. His spirit had died with Mary Kate and he rose and went to work and he returned and sat in his chair staring into the fire until he fell asleep.
There were no relatives and so at thirteen Kate became the mother of the family. On the day her mother died she had been at school and the teacher had mentioned a writer called Charles Dickens and a book called A Tale of Two Cities. Oh, how Kate hungered to read that book. Reading was for school children or the leisured classes and Kate belonged to neither. She could have asked Pat to borrow the book for her but when could she have read it? Without a qualm she forgot all about Sydney Carton, until years later she was introduced to the wonders of motion pictures and fell in love with a young actor called Dirk Bogarde.
For now, Kate set herself to rising every morning at half past three. She would rinse the sleep from her eyes with the ice-cold water she had left out the night before, pull on some clothes and then, while everyone was still asleep, she would rake the coals in the grate and throw on some kindling, hoping desperately that the fire would catch and that she would not have to start it all over again. Next the kettle would be set on the hotplate, and the pan of porridge that she had also prepared before going to bed. Only then would she wake Da from the exhausted sleep that never seemed to refresh him. Almost as soon as he pulled on his moleskin trousers she would pass a mug of hot sweet tea into his hand which was still grimy from yesterday’s coal dust, and then set before him a heaping bowl of porridge. Liam would wolf it down without a word while she spread dripping over four thick slices of her own crusty bread and put them into the tin box carried down the pit every day. Falls of coal and rock were quite common, if not always dangerous, and it was the miners’ tins that bore the brunt of them. Liam Kennedy’s tin was bashed, as were his fingers, fingers that had once, long ago, teased such sweet music from his granda’s fiddle. It was doubtful that he had any idea of that same fiddle’s whereabouts and even more doubtful that he would have cared. Music belonged to his childhood in Limerick.
Did he ever look at Kate’s childhood? Could he have borne it if he had? He would smile when he took his dented tin from her small hands – the smile for which a stronger woman than Mary Kate Kennedy would have left her home in Limerick.
‘Thank you, Allanah,’ he would whisper softly and she would watch him on his long walk to the pithead until his thin figure disappeared from view. Then, at the beginning of the day, she would have her moment of peace and quiet. She would set water on to boil for the washing – Mary Kate had been fanatical about cleanliness, mouthing all the old platitudes as if she had invented them; ‘Sure isn’t cleanliness nearest to Godliness’ – and while Kate waited she would pour herself a mug of the thick, black tea, add three lumps of sugar, and sit down in Da’s chair to enjoy both the tea and the solitude. If she was very lucky she might sit long enough to enjoy the morning song of the birds, but she would never ever waste time. There were always the baby’s cloots to wash, and the other bairns’ clothes, and once a week the pit clothes that never got clean no matter how hard she scrubbed them on the scrubbing board. Then there were her own underclothes. She had made herself two pairs of knickers, one to wear and one to wash. As soon as she could manage, she would make a third pair for emergencies. She remembered her mother talking about a young woman who had died suddenly in the Main Street. ‘Her underclothes was as clean as if she had just come out of a shop; you be sure, Kate Kennedy, that if you’re ever hit by a cart, which God forbid, you need never be ashamed of your knickers.’
As well as keeping her underwear clean, Kate had a hip-bath every Saturday night and it was then that she washed her long, blue-black hair with carbolic soap. Her hair was truly a crowning glory but no one ever said so, and Kate had neither the time nor the inclination to admire it herself. Perhaps if she had, she would have stolen a few more moments for herself, to brush and curl it. As it was, she washed it every Saturday and for the rest of the week, was content to drag a comb through it every morning.
First published in 1997 in the United Kingdom by Little, Brown as Walnut Shell Days
This ebook edition published in 2017 by
Zaffre Publishing
80-81 Wimpole St, London, W1G 9RE
www.zaffrebooks.co.uk
Copyright © Eileen Ramsay, 1997, 2017
The moral right of Eileen Ramsay to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-785-76230-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-785-76229-1
This ebook was produced by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd
Zaffre Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Zaffre, a Bonnier Publishing company
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The Farm Girl's Dream Page 25
