The kitten mewled and struggled and, when Helen made a grab for it, shot out a tiny paw and scratched her hand. She dropped it, and it scampered off under the spiky whin hedge, tiny tail aloft with injured dignity. Helen sucked her hand, annoyed at the tears pricking the backs of her eyes. She didn’t even like Nora much, so why was she upset at fighting with her? ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ As if Helen were a child.
But maybe she was? She didn’t know – or care – much about Home Rule, and being Irish or British. She just knew she hated people talking about it. She had always quite liked having the excuse that she could see both sides because of Mama and Papa being from different religions. But maybe that was just laziness? Maybe she ought to be able to make up her mind?
Still, what was the point? She brushed the kitten’s hairs off her coat. Adults would sort it out – men would sort it out – and whatever happened Helen would just carry on living in Cyclamen Terrace beside the park, going to school and playing hockey and being best friends with Mabel. She’d go to church with Papa as usual on Sundays, while Mama went alone to mass in the big convent on the main road.
She scrambled down from the wall and set off to join the boys.
‘That’ll do now,’ Michael was saying, looking at the newly-made pen. ‘We’ll set it up in the corner of the barn, if you don’t mind helping me to carry it in?’
He straightened up and pressed his hands into the small of his back. Fly, thinking this was a game, barked and jumped up, leaving muddy paw-prints on his trousers.
Sandy flexed the fingers of his bad arm. His cheeks were reddened with effort and with the January air.
‘Just give me a minute before I lift anything. It’s fine but it hasn’t been put to the test much until today. Smoke?’
He pulled out a packet of Gallahers, offered it to Michael, and then, obviously joking, to Helen in the kind of gesture that might have delighted a seven-year-old.
Helen tossed her plaits. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘Michael, is it true that you want to join up? But Uncle Sean’s against it?’
Michael’s eyes widened in surprise, as if a kitten had started talking.
‘But if you’re a Nationalist, do you not hate England?’ she went on.
‘Not hate. It shouldn’t be ruling Ireland,’ Michael said. ‘And it won’t be for much longer. But I do hate sitting round on the farm doing nothing when other lads are joining up.’
His dark eyes, exactly like Mama’s, were restless.
‘You’re not doing nothing,’ Sandy said, his Belfast accent contrasting with Michael’s softer one. ‘And even if conscription comes in – farmers will be exempt.’
‘There’ll be no conscription in Ireland,’ Michael said, in the same confident way that Nora had said Home Rule would come. ‘That’s the surest way to start a rebellion.’
Rebellion? Helen shuddered. But I’m not a baby, she thought, I’m fourteen; if I were at Papa’s school I’d be leaving now and going to work, so I should know things. I’m not a little girl to tease.
‘So – Uncle Sean thinks there should be some kind of rebellion?’ she made herself ask. ‘While the war’s still on? But you – don’t?’
‘Da and Gerry say Ireland never got anything off England except by violence.’ Michael drew on his cigarette. ‘I want an Irish Ireland and I’ll fight for it if I have to.’ He looked across the yard at the hills, and the mountains in the distance. ‘But helping England win the war is the surest way to get it.’
‘Sure that’s what Redmond’s been saying since the start,’ Sandy said. ‘That’s why he’s been encouraging Nationalists to join up. And plenty have. Out there – well …’ He stubbed out his cigarette under his boot.
‘Ready?’ he said, nodding at the palings. The boys bent and lifted them, and carried them into the barn together, Fly darting importantly ahead.
Helen ran to help and, though the wooden palings were heavier than she thought and the boys didn’t really need her, she made herself bear some of the weight.
3.
It wasn’t the best birthday tea Helen had ever had, despite the beautiful cake Aunt Bridie had made, with fourteen pink candles.
Partly it was worry about Mama. Despite having rested most of the afternoon, she seemed tired and ate little, crumbling a scone in her long thin fingers and breaking off every so often to cough into her handkerchief. Helen wished Mama was strong and rosy like her sister-in-law. Mama was pretty but she didn’t do many of the things other mothers did. Even at home she spent long hours reading, or just lying on the chaise longue, not knitting or sewing – ‘Just being,’ she’d say when Helen would come in from school and ask what she was doing.
Now she removed herself from the tea-table – they always sat round the table for tea at Derryward, in the bright parlour whose window looked straight across to the Mourne mountains, which Helen much preferred to the balancing acts she had to perform with plate and cup at Aunt Violet’s. ‘I don’t want my cough to annoy people,’ she said.
‘Go and sit by the fire, Eileen,’ Aunt Bridie said.
‘But come back for me blowing out my candles?’ Helen could have bitten her tongue – there she went again, sounding like a child.
She caught Nora’s scornful dark eyes and looked down at her plate. She and Nora Weren’t Speaking, but she didn’t think anyone had noticed. And Nora might have called Sandy a British soldier in that rude, unwelcoming way, but it didn’t stop her from being enchanted by him, fussing round him, refreshing his teacup when it was still almost full.
Helen heard the click of the back door latch. Aunt Bridie’s broad face broke into a smile. ‘There’s your Uncle Sean at last,’ she said.
Uncle Sean was huge and red. It was hard to think that he was Mama’s brother. His loud voice – ‘I defy any cattle to break through that fence now’ – preceded him into the room, followed by his woollen-jerseyed belly and finally his big roughened face.
He nodded at Helen. ‘Happy birthday, daughter,’ he said. He always called her daughter. He called all girls daughter. ‘What are you now – ten?’
Helen swelled with indignation and then realised he was joking. ‘Ninety-three,’ she replied with dignity.
He gave a snort of laughter. ‘Is there tay in that pot, Nora?’
He noticed Sandy for the first time and nodded.
Sandy swallowed his last crumb of soda bread and stood up to shake Uncle Sean’s hand. ‘How do you do, sir?’ he asked. ‘I’m Helen’s cousin, Sandy Reid.’
‘You’re welcome here.’ Uncle Sean looked Sandy up and down, as if assessing him as a possible worker. Helen felt proud: Sandy was nearly as tall as Uncle Sean, and even though he wasn’t in uniform he looked, in her eyes, every inch the young officer. No wonder Nora was gazing at him with her big bovine eyes.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Sandy said.
‘Michael – have you that job finished?’
Michael nodded. ‘All set up in the corner of the barn and I’ve the calf moved in and all. He’s well settled.’
Helen thought of the scruffy brown calf, its cut leg smeared in some kind of purple lotion, and how trustingly it had lain in Michael’s arms before he had set it gently into its pen.
Uncle Sean grunted. ‘Did you give him plenty of hay?’
‘I know how to look after a calf.’
The edge to Michael’s voice made Helen look up in surprise: she had never heard it before.
‘Bloody nuisance, getting himself cut like that. And me and Gerry wasting a whole day fixing the fences.’
‘It’s the barbed wire,’ Michael said. ‘I keep telling you.’
Uncle Sean stared at him over the rim of his cup. ‘Barbed wire’s saved me a fortune. Never mind the time it takes to mend walls.’
‘The dry-stone walls are beautiful, though, sir,’ Sandy said. ‘I haven’t been to this part of the country before and they were one of the first things I noticed. It must be a skilled job.’
‘Aye,
it is. And half the men in the country away. Bloody fools.’
‘No, they’re not,’ Michael said. He frowned at his plate.
‘Don’t start,’ Aunt Bridie said. ‘Not when we’ve a guest. And it’s wee Helen’s birthday.’
Nora smirked at the ‘wee Helen’ and then, probably trying to sound grown-up in front of Sandy, said in a put-on, showy-off voice, ‘I suppose you must see a lot of barbed wire at the Front? I’ve heard it can do terrible damage?’
The air seemed to shudder. Sandy shook his head, his cheeks suddenly white under his freckles, his blue eyes darkened with something Helen couldn’t read – a memory? She knew the injury to his arm had been caused by ripping it on barbed wire while he’d been trying to get one of his injured men back to safety. The man had died of his wounds. Sandy had never told her this, but she had overheard her parents talking.
I hate you, Nora, Helen thought. She might only be fourteen today and she didn’t have much of a bosom yet, and childish plaits and short skirts, but for goodness sake! She knew better than to talk about wire, or trenches, or people being killed. Especially when Sandy was going back in two days’ time.
‘Isn’t it time for my candles?’ she said loudly, and Nora tossed her head and rolled her eyes, but Sandy gave Helen a tight, grateful smile.
Helen lit the fourteen pink candles with one match and everyone cheered. But she wasn’t sure what to wish for – there were so many big things this year. She could wish for Sandy to stay safe; for Mama to get better; for there not to be any kind of rebellion or trouble. She closed her eyes, inhaled, felt the heat of the candles caress her cheeks and decided just to let the wish come to her.
She exhaled.
I wish I could be more grown-up.
There was clapping, and when she opened her eyes she saw she’d managed to blow out every single candle.
4.
‘No, Michael, I’ll take them.’ Uncle Sean heaved his bulk up from his chair. ‘I don’t like you driving in the dark. You go too fast. You’ll have the mare wore out.’
Michael sighed and made as if to protest, but Aunt Bridie reached over and squeezed the top of his arm, as if to say, Don’t argue. Helen wanted to say they could walk to the station, but it was too far. For the first time she was happy to leave Derryward. The tension between Uncle Sean and Michael made her feel hot and prickly.
Mama kissed her and hugged Sandy and wished him well; Aunt Bridie gave her some of the cake, wrapped in greaseproof paper; Nora muttered goodbye, not looking up from her crochet; and Michael said that she could take the tabby kitten for a birthday present. Helen looked hopefully at Mama but Mama shook her head.
‘I can’t have cats in the house,’ she said. ‘They make me cough.’
‘Sure it’d stay outside,’ Michael said.
At Derryward the cats were never in the house, roaming the outhouses and getting fat on mice.
‘There isn’t anywhere outside,’ Helen said. ‘Only a tiny front garden and a back yard.’
Michael shook his head as if he couldn’t imagine this. He had never visited Cyclamen Terrace. He had once been to Belfast for a hurling match, but that had been over the other side of the city.
Outside, the lichen on the stone walls gleamed in the moonlight, and the mare’s breath was a frosty cloud. Helen sat in the back of the trap and looked at the broad tweed backs of Uncle Sean and Sandy in front. The chill evening air scratched her cheeks.
She tried to block out the conversation – more boring politics. She would have called it an argument except that Sandy was being very calm and kept calling Uncle Sean ‘sir’.
Uncle Sean said, ‘Yous boys have had it all your own way for centuries. But yous can’t hold back the tide now. Home Rule’s coming one way or another.’
‘I hope not, sir,’ Sandy said. ‘But if it does there’ll be special provision for Ulster. Ulstermen won’t stand for a Catholic state.’
‘And Irishmen won’t stand for a divided country.’
Men, Helen thought, always men. Irishmen. Ulstermen.
She wished she hadn’t squandered her birthday wish so foolishly – all she longed for now was for them to be at the station before Uncle Sean flew into one of his rages. But he didn’t. He clicked his tongue and the mare trotted faster. They were on the main road now, and as the trap swung uphill to the wayside station the ring of her iron-shod hooves was the only sound in the darkness.
In the train, they had a compartment to themselves. It might get busy after Ballynahinch, but for now Helen lolled in her seat in a way that would have outraged Mama and Aunt Violet. The drumlins of County Down, black humps in the moonlight, sped past the windows. It was hard to believe that tomorrow morning she would be sitting in Latin class and giggling with her best friend Mabel Craig and helping make up parcels for the former pupils at the Front – old boys’ parcels, they called them. And soon Sandy would be at the Front. She sighed and dug her hands deeper into her coat pockets. Sandy pulled one of her plaits and drew her into a sideways hug.
‘Tired?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she began, then, remembering her wish, ‘no, of course not.’ It was lovely, slumping against Sandy like this, feeling the rough wool of his overcoat against her cheek, and he must have quite liked it too because he didn’t move away.
‘It was funny, seeing Aunt Eileen there,’ he said. ‘She seemed more comfortable than she does at home. I suppose it’s where she grew up.’
Helen bit her lip.
‘Sorry,’ Sandy said. ‘Was that the wrong thing to say? I just meant – well, it’s good that she can go there. For her health.’
‘Hmmm.’ Helen didn’t want to talk about Mama.
Sandy looked at her keenly. ‘Talking of saying the wrong thing,’ he said, ‘thanks for – you know.’
Helen did know. ‘Nora’s a beast,’ she said. ‘And she has a pash on you. She couldn’t keep her eyes off you!’
‘Well – dashing young officer. It’s understandable.’ He grinned, but then lapsed into one of his old silences. The train trundled on through the black evening. People got on at Ballynahinch but nobody came into their carriage.
‘You didn’t mind talking to Michael about the war,’ Helen said, when the train got going again.
‘Not really, no.’
‘Because he’s a boy?’
‘I suppose so. He reminded me of the boys in my platoon.’ He looked out of the window, and said, in a casual tone, ‘I wonder how many of those boys are still alive.’
Helen had a quick fantasy in which Michael joined up and ended up in Sandy’s platoon, and they would save each other’s lives and get medals, then both come home and be safe forever. She shook her head at her own idiocy. If Michael did join up – and of course he wouldn’t, Uncle Sean would kill him before the Germans did – even she knew that Catholics and Protestants tended to join different regiments. If I were a boy, she thought, which one would I join? Because I’m neither one thing nor the other. Maybe neither would want me.
‘I’m glad I’m not a boy,’ she said.
Sandy didn’t reply. Helen gave him a tiny kick – as always when she had been at Derryward, her boots were dusty, with a rim of dried mud. Some of it broke off and fell on to the wooden floor of the train. ‘Sandy?’ she said. ‘I may not be a boy but I’m not a child.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You could tell me things.’
He sighed. ‘Better not. It’s a different world. People can’t understand.’
‘Not if you don’t tell them the truth.’
‘Do you really think my mother wants to know the truth?’
‘She reads us your letters.’ Sandy’s letters – longed for, celebrated, but always, secretly, for Helen, rather empty. He had said more in the letter he’d sent to the school to thank them for his old boys’ parcel. ‘You always say everything’s fine.’
‘That’s what she wants to hear. It’s like – well, like you not wanting to talk about Aunt Eileen.’
>
For a moment Helen felt bruised, and then it was a sudden relief to say, ‘I know she isn’t happy. We all say it’s her chest, but it’s more than that.’
He took her hand and didn’t let go. His felt rough, the skin drier than her own.
‘You’re not “wee Helen” any more, are you?’ he said, looking at her closely.
She met his blue eyes with confidence. ‘No, she said, ‘I’m not. And I don’t mind hearing nasty things. If anything ever happens that you want to tell someone – you can write to me. I won’t tell anyone.’
‘Promise?’
Helen nodded and squeezed his hand. ‘Promise,’ she said. And wasn’t sure whether she should hope for such a letter, or pray that Sandy would never need to write one.
5.
When Miss Linden wasn’t at prayers, and then didn’t show up for history first lesson, there was a lot of gossip in the lower fourth. At least, the girls gossiped; the boys, on their side of the classroom, lounged against desks and wondered if the pitches would be too hard for rugby this afternoon.
‘Maybe she got married and left,’ suggested Florence Bell.
‘She probably has flu,’ Mabel said. Florence’s notions were not to be encouraged, and Helen and Mabel spent a great deal of time avoiding her – she lived in the same street as Mabel. ‘I had it the whole holidays. I couldn’t eat a thing on Christmas Day.’
Mabel looked fine now, her face as round as ever, her dark curls already springing out of the velvet band that was supposed to keep them off her face. Looking at those curls, Helen touched her own hair self-consciously. She had experimented with one plait today, tying it top and bottom with navy ribbon. It felt secure enough, but she had no idea what it looked like.
‘Mabs,’ she whispered. ‘Will you check my hair’s all right at the back?’
Mabel spun her round, pronounced the single plait ‘very swish’ and said, ‘She can’t have got married, Florrie – her fiancé’s at the Front.’
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