1949

by Morgan Llywelyn

  She was hugely proud of them.

  She did not let herself think about how lonely she was. No one came to call. As far as Catholic Ireland was concerned, Ursula had done the unforgivable. She had borne a child while unmarried and dared to keep the baby. Her soul was damned.

  The only friends she had now were those from the past.

  Ursula began writing letters to give her new address to correspondents around the world. Felicity Rowe-Howell was the first to reply. “Congratulate me; I’ve joined the working classes. I’m now a factory worker at Cricklewood, helping to build a quite splendid bomber called a Halifax. When the shift is over we girls, still in our dungarees, jump on the underground and get off at Green Park. Within a few minutes we’re in the Ritz Bar, being toasted by servicemen. This is the life, Ursula! Whatever did we do for excitement before the war?”

  A few days later Madame Dosterschill popped unbidden into Ursula’s thoughts. The gentle German language teacher with the twinkling eyes. What was happening to her in all of this?

  Ursula wrote to Surval, hoping someone there would at least know where Madame was.

  She never received a reply.

  She never heard from either of the Florentine twins again, either.

  Mussolini’s decision to enter the war had dismayed many Italians, who traditionally regarded Britain as a friend. It also had the effect of virtually cutting off Geneva from the rest of the world.

  “I still have not received your letter of recommendation from Seán,” Elsie Lester wrote, “but am thankful that you no longer need it. Enjoy the farm, and please give Barry a big hug for me.”

  The Ryan brothers had buried Saoirse in the field beside the laneway, where he had spent the last years of his life. Only one tree stood in the field, an ancient thorn tree that had sunk its roots deep into a strange low mound. At the foot of the mound was Saoirse’s grave. One of the brothers had marked it with a slab of limestone.

  Ursula rarely visited the cemetery on the hill where generations of Hallorans were buried. But she often visited Saoirse’s grave.

  Knowing that experience was the best teacher, Ursula visited the markets to talk to veteran farmers. At first they were surprised that a young woman was showing any interest in agricultural matters, but she smiled and listened and smiled more, and eventually they warmed to her.

  She was repeatedly told that the climate was colder and wetter than it used to be. Only one man disagreed. “Our climate is wonderful,” he insisted. “Sure ’tis only the weather that spoils it.”

  The weather did seem to be causing exceptional difficulties for tillage farmers. The Halloran farm was not alone; throughout Clare yields had dropped drastically. Livestock, the old-timers claimed, could cope better. Damp, cold soil and a short summer season did not matter as much to them. In Ireland grass grew no matter what. Income per acre was lower with livestock farming than with tillage, but costs were lower too. There was no need to hire extra help at harvest time.

  Ursula listened and learned.

  “We’re out of the barley business,” she informed the Ryan brothers. “We’re going to buy dairy cows.”

  George said, “Why not sheep? They don’t need as much tending.”

  “They won’t make as much money, either. There’s a war on and there’s talk of rationing. The prices for milk and butter are bound to go up.”

  “You know anything about dairy farming?” Gerry asked.

  “I know how to learn,” Ursula told him. “And I hope you do too.”

  As Ursula walked away the brothers exchanged glances. “What d’ye think?” George asked Gerry.

  “Won’t do no harm,” the other replied.

  In Europe Ursula had seen prosperous farms occupying land that appeared to be no more suitable than the wettest or stoniest holdings in Clare. Yet every acre was profitably put to work.

  If they can do it, we can do it.

  Once she had taken the farm for granted, but those days were well and truly gone. “Hard graft, that’s what’s needed now,” she told Barry.

  “Grft,” the little boy agreed. He was beginning to walk independently, toddling along behind his mother wherever she went. He did not want to be carried and did not even want his hand held.

  Although publicly de Valera was unwavering in his commitment to Irish neutrality, on his instructions the Irish government quietly began supplying the British with intelligence information.2 Finbar Cassidy helped collate the material. Sometimes he stopped in the midst of his work and thought of Ursula.

  Thanks to his job in External Affairs, he knew she had joined Lester’s staff at the League of Nations. He had heard nothing of her since. Once or twice he had started to write to her in Geneva, then decided against it. Finbar was not at his most persuasive in writing. Better to wait until she returned to Ireland.

  Finbar knew how to be patient.

  While he waited he lit candles for Ursula at Mass and prayed daily for her safety.

  De Valera’s determination to make Ireland self-sufficient meant new government agencies were being created to help the farmers. Ursula ordered every pamphlet available and attended every lecture in the Grange. She made a thorough study of those crops that were doing well in Clare; she toured local farms to see how the more successful farmers raised and fed—and culled, when necessary—their dairy herds.

  Ursula did everything she asked her hired men to do except the culling. She could not kill an animal.

  The work was unremitting but she thrived on it. What one did to a farm showed.

  Ursula eagerly awaited the arrival of mail though she had no time to read it until the end of the day, when everyone else was in bed. Letters from abroad were very slow in coming. Many of her friends in Europe never responded to her change of address and request for news from their part of the world.

  Some had vanished as surely as if the ground had opened and swallowed them up.

  How strange it was to be so far removed from it all! Walking over a summer field starred with wildflowers while an armada of clouds sailed serenely overhead, it was easy to imagine that the world was at peace. War? What war?

  That attitude was dangerous. Ignorance was dangerous; it left one unprepared.

  The Ryan brothers, who lived on the other side of Clarecastle, walked out to the farm every morning. Ursula had them call at the newsagent’s shop on their way and buy the papers for her.

  The civil war in Spain was long since over, superseded by something worse. But in the pages of the Clare Champion and the Limerick Leader updated casualty lists containing local names still appeared from time to time. Ursula never found Ned Halloran among them.

  That meant nothing. Many men went missing in war and were never accounted for.

  In the pages of the Irish Times and Irish Press Ursula followed news of the war in Europe. She also listened avidly to the wireless in the parlor. Most farmhouses kept the wireless in the kitchen, but Ursula spent no more time in that room than necessary. She was learning to farm but she would never learn to cook well. The meals she prepared out of necessity could best be described as filling.

  Fortunately Barry liked everything. Even eggs. So Ursula bought a rooster and a harem of hens.

  After their evening meal she let Barry stay up for a while to listen to the wireless with her. Ursula treated the occasion as an event the way Henry had done so long ago when he read the newspapers to her, and gave Barry hot cocoa—until the cocoa ran out.

  “We shan’t be getting any more, I suspect,” the shopkeepers said. “The war, you know.”

  Ursula listened alone to the last news bulletin on the wireless before she put out the lamps and went to bed.

  She had not contacted Lewis during the stopover in London, nor had she seen Finbar while in Dublin. She did not want either man to know she was back in Ireland. All that was over now.

  Yet in her dreams she could not escape her memories. Sometimes she awoke with a blurred sense of reality to find that the man in the bed beside her
was a chubby little fellow with red-gold hair.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  “You finally have a letter from Ursula,” Ella told Henry when he arrived home one evening.

  “Thank God. We’ve heard nothing from her in months and I was getting very worried. The situation in Europe…”

  “You needn’t worry anymore, dearest. The letter’s postmarked ‘Éire.’”

  Henry almost snatched the envelope out of his wife’s hand. While Ella hovered beside him, he read the letter aloud.

  “We are safe at home,” Ursula had written, “on the farm in Clare.”

  Ella raised her eyebrows. “‘We?’”

  Henry read on. “So much has happened I hardly know where to begin. And yet nothing has happened here; not on the larger scale. People furtively pull back the curtains to spy on their neighbours just as they have always done. Their only interest is in the personal, not the global, and I am supplying a full quota of titillation.

  “‘I am sorry to tell you that Lucy Halloran was killed in a farming accident this spring. From my point of view it was a blessing in disguise because she left the farm to me. I only learned this when I returned to Ireland, in need of a place to live and a way to support myself and Barry.’”

  “Barry?” Ella echoed. “Who in the world is Barry?”

  “Be patient, Cap’n, I’m coming to that. “‘Barry is the best news of all,’ she says. ‘He is my son, Finbar Lewis Halloran.’”

  Ella looked around for the nearest chair and sank onto it. “Her son? I don’t understand, Henry. When was she married? She never mentioned it before.”

  Henry’s eyes were racing over the page. “She doesn’t say anything about being married, Cap’n.”

  “Dear God.”

  “And she doesn’t give any details about the boy’s…mmm…father.”

  “Do you suppose she picked the child up in Europe as an orphan, a foundling? Like history repeating itself? Is that why his surname is Halloran?”

  “Mmm…no. Listen to this. “‘Barry was born in Geneva on the sixth of April, 1939. Ella will be glad to hear I had an easy birth. My obstetrician was one of the best in Europe. Afterward I was able to keep Barry with me while working at the League. In Ireland that sort of situation is not possible—unless one is running a farm, as I am now.’”

  Henry put down the letter. He and his wife stared at each other.

  At last he cleared his throat. “Little Business always was a law unto herself,” he said.

  Turning a rundown tillage farm into an up-to-date dairy business would require a daunting amount of money. For the first time in her life, Ursula entered a bank to ask for a loan.

  The Bank of Ireland on O’Connell Square in Ennis was an imposing structure by Irish standards, but Ursula swept through the doors as if she were accustomed to doing business there every day.

  The bank manager, who recently had transferred up from Limerick, was amused by this woman with her audacious plans. She held title to a good-sized farm, but in the west of Ireland money was loaned as much on family reputation as on collateral. The manager narrowed his eyes to suspicious slits. “Who are your people, Miss Halloran?”

  “Does the name Ned Halloran mean anything to you? He fought in 1916.”

  The man’s expression changed abruptly. “Sure didn’t I meet Ned Halloran when I was just a young lad? My da served with him in the War of Independence. He was a hard man, was Ned. His teeth were the softest part of him.”

  Ursula ignored the use of the past tense. “Ned Halloran is my father,” she said.

  That night the banker casually mentioned his new customer to his wife. Her face froze with outrage. “Do you not know that woman isn’t married?”

  “I do of course, it’s on her loan application. But she has excellent collateral and the kind of attitude that—”

  “She isn’t married yet she has a child,” his wife hissed. “How can you loan money to someone of such low morality?”

  Part of the bank manager’s business was to know everyone else’s business—and keep it confidential. Over the years his wife’s proclivity for gossip had caused him a number of problems, and was the principle reason he had been transferred from his last posting. “Her morality won’t show on the balance sheet!” he snapped. “And that’s all they pay me to worry about.”

  As soon as she had the money Ursula began buying cows. She hired builders to convert the barn into a modern milking parlor like those she had seen in Europe. The workmen argued with her over almost every detail. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” she was told repeatedly.

  “I know that I’m the one paying you. Do it my way or someone else will.”

  They were taken aback by her directness, but they did what she wanted. A job that paid in money rather than promises was worth keeping.

  George and Gerry were put to work mending fences and reseeding pastures so the cattle could graze year-round. They were still hard at it when the cows arrived. Twenty black-and-white Frisians, a hardy breed originally developed in the northern Netherlands and valued for the quantity of their milk.

  On the day they were delivered to the farm Ursula walked among them like a miser gloating over his gold. Stroking the spotted hides. Rubbing the knobbly skulls between the large ears. To take such joy in life when thousands were losing theirs as the war gathered momentum seemed like a betrayal, but she could not help it.

  “Be careful, Miss,” Gerry advised. “Dairy cows ain’t pets.”

  “They won’t hurt me,” Ursula assured him. “Animals never hurt me.” Only people.

  Although America remained neutral Germany was threatening shipping in the North Atlantic. Yet mail continued to go through. Henry Mooney’s letters attempted to discover, without asking outright, the circumstances of Barry’s birth. Ursula’s replies consisted of farm news and updates on the Irish political scene.

  “She’s not going to tell us,” Henry told his wife.

  “She probably thinks it’s none of our business.”

  “But it is, Cap’n! She’s family!”

  Ella gave him a pitying look. “She’s a grown woman, dearest. With a family of her own.”

  “Do you have any idea how much courage she’ll need to raise a child when she’s not married? It would be hard enough over here. In Ireland it must be…mmm…hell in a handbasket. People will be merciless to her.”

  Many were—or tried to be. Ursula never actually said she was widowed but was willing to give that impression. No one believed it because Barry’s surname was the same as her own.

  As Ursula had written to Henry, curtains were twitched aside when she passed on the road. Hostile eyes peeked out at her; disapproving heads were shaken. The good women of Clarecastle made a point of avoiding her in the shops. Even in Ennis, the county seat, she was subjugated to stares and whispers.

  From the very beginning she trained herself to act as if she did not notice. When the self-righteous treated her as if she were invisible, she responded by acting as if their bad manners were invisible. She went about her business with her chin up and giving everyone the same dazzling smile.

  I have nothing to be ashamed of; I’ve given life to a child. You’re the ones who should be ashamed, you vicious old harridans who profess to be Christians.

  When, from the pulpit, the parish priest condemned “the invisible gas of moral turpitude seeping under Ireland’s doors,” Ursula stopped going to Mass. She sought a more compassionate God in the fields and meadows and whispered her prayers to the wind.

  She was at work before sunrise and continued to work until dark. Aside from taking a long nap in the afternoon, Barry toddled along behind his mother or played happily nearby. The first time he fell down and skinned his knees he glanced toward Ursula. His crumpled face was on the verge of tears. Ursula made herself laugh. Taking his cue from her, Barry laughed too.

  Until Barry came to the farm the Ryan brothers had had little contact with children. They considered them almost anot
her species of animal, unpredictable and incomprehensible, best observed from afar. Barry changed all that. The two crusty old bachelors doted on him.

  Barry Halloran did not cling to his mother’s apron strings. Ursula did not wear an apron anyway. As soon as he was able to walk on his own, Barry wandered off by himself from time to time. “ ’Sploring,” he called it. Ursula gave him his head, though either she or one of the Ryan brothers was always aware of his location. “Call for help if you get into difficulties,” he was told.

  He never called for help.

  Ursula was adamant that the cows and their environment be kept spotlessly clean. The Ryan brothers grumbled aloud but began to take pride in their work. Without being told they sought out things that needed to be done, and did them. Every day brought some improvement to the place.

  Neighboring farmers began nodding to Ursula when they met her in the road. Their wives continued to ignore her as if she were a bad smell in the air, but she did not care. She had the farm and Barry. She did not need the good opinion of other women.

  The wireless brought unrelenting bad news. The German Luftwaffe had increased aerial attacks on shipping in the English Channel. British losses were mounting up.

  Mail boats and passenger steamers leaving Britain for Ireland were escorted by British destroyers for much of the way, following a zigzag evasive course that invariably made them late for arriving. Boats leaving Irish ports for Britain were accorded the same service in reverse.

  In France a little-known brigadier general and tank expert, Charles de Gaulle, urged his countrymen to fight on. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of the French resistance must not go out.”

  The British navy removed the threat of the French fleet falling into German hands by destroying most of the ships as they lay at anchor in Algeria. A thousand French sailors were killed in the process. The British government expressed regret at the loss of life and hoped it would not adversely affect Anglo-French relations.