by Anne Bennett
She didn’t blame Kevin and Grace for not wanting to return to the life they’d been glad to escape from. They hadn’t actually said as much but their reply to her letter, though civil and polite enough, was stilted and lacked warmth, and Maeve’s heart had ached as she’d read it. She sincerely hoped that they’d settle down at home eventually and that Brendan would leave them alone.
She took out the scrapbook filled with photos taken and sent by Annie, which Maeve had kept hidden underneath a threadbare cushion on one of the chairs in the room. Over the years she’d looked at it with the young ones around her, building up a picture for the little ones of their older brother and sister. That night, though, she wanted to look at the scrapbook alone.
Brendan had never cast his eyes on it, for she knew if anything were to upset him at all he’d be capable of flinging the book into the fire. And that would have torn the heart out of her, for it was the only record she had of the children growing up.
Maeve had only been back home from Ireland three weeks when, in early July 1939, Kevin had made his First Holy Communion. Her mother had bought a camera for the occasion and sent photographs of Kevin wearing smart grey trousers and the shirt and sash that had been as white as snow, and he’d held a white missal in his scrubbed hands. Maeve’s own hands had trembled as she’d held the pictures of her son and she’d cried her eyes out because she couldn’t be there by his side.
But still she was grateful to her mother for thinking of taking the photograph and over the years many more had come. Rosemarie’s wedding was just a month later and she saw the whole family dressed up again, with Grace in a bridesmaid dress to match Nuala’s and Colin and Kevin in suits and both as smart as paint.
A year later, it was Grace’s turn to put on the white dress of the First Communicant and the veil held in place with a headdress of rosebuds. Maeve saw her blonde hair framing her earnest little face, trying to take in the enormity of it all. Then there were more casual photographs taken around the farm, out in the fields or in the milk shed, or cutting peat in the bog, and Maeve stored them jealously.
Interspersed with them was news of the family Annie was determined Maeve would not forget. Maeve knew when Liam passed his accountancy exams and Kate qualified as a nurse. She heard about the births of her brother Tom and Peggy’s children and later those of Rosemarie and Greg, and she often felt as if her mother was reaching over the sea to her.
The last formal picture of the children was the one taken at their Confirmation. They’d travelled to the town for it the previous year and Kevin had written to describe his blue suit with his first pair of long trousers and Grace told of her dress of purest white satin caught up with white roses and the layers of lace underskirt beneath it.
Maeve held that photograph in her hand for a long time the day it came. There were tears of pride in her eyes for her children and also for the goodness of her parents, who’d looked after them so well. But she was filled with shame that she’d had little hand in their rearing.
She didn’t know what they remembered of their early years with their father. Not wishing to frighten them, she told no one of the life she was living with Brendan, even when her mother asked her specifically, knowing she would be unable to do anything about any of it.
She’d also made few references to the war raging about them, no mention of the petrifying fear she often felt at the explosions, so loud they rocked the buildings, or of the people who found they had no homes to return to, the neighbours that would be neighbours no longer and the numbers of ordinary civilians dying. But Annie and Thomas were not fools. They’d listened to the wireless and read the papers and had known some of what Maeve had been suffering.
In the early spring of 1941, Maeve had written to her mother and told her that she’d been issued with a Morrison shelter, and now they’d all be as safe as houses and she’d even had Elsie take a photograph of it to reassure her.
Annie had looked aghast at the photograph and thought it looked little larger than a dog kennel and just as uncomfortable, but Thomas had said tetchily if it kept them all safe what did it matter a damn what it looked like? Annie had known he had a point and she’d written to Maeve and said she was delighted that she had such a shelter.
Maeve often left her mother’s letters around for Brendan to read or she’d read little bits out to him, or the little notes from the children to remind him he had others growing up, but he’d never expressed the slightest interest. He didn’t know for example that Kevin had a rare feel for the land, but Maeve did, because her mother had told her in a letter written a bare two years after he’d arrived in Ireland.
It’s strange and him city bred. You’d scarce believe he’s only nine, he’s able to get through so much work. Your daddy says he couldn’t manage without him. He’s his right-hand man, especially as Colin is up in Dublin lodging with Liam while he studies to be a vet at the university.
Now Maeve wondered how her son with a feel for the land would cope with being enclosed in the stupefying heat and noise of a brass foundry.
She gave a sigh and closed the book, replacing it under the cushion, and went back to bed. But once there, she couldn’t get comfortable somehow, and she felt the small mound of her stomach under the bedclothes and wished she’d not fallen for yet another child. It was a wicked thought and against the Church’s teaching. The priest said you must be grateful for what God sent you but Mary Ann would only be seventeen months when this one would be born, and Maeve wished God had waited a wee while. To Maeve it would be yet another mouth to feed.
Not, of course, that she’d ever have done anything to get rid of it, for that would be an abomination under God and a mortal sin too. She knew of those who’d tried, including one desperate young girl just sixteen, who’d bled to death at the hands of a back-street butcher.
If Brendan had been a different sort of father, she’d have welcomed any number of children, but the way he was . . . Well, it was better to have as few as possible.
Away in Ireland, Grace and Kevin sat on the five-barred gate where they’d sat so many times before. In front of them were the narrow tracks of the rail bus that ran at the bottom of their granddad Thomas Brannigan’s farm and Kevin was hurling pebbles at them with savagery. The pebbles zinged on the iron rails, the odd one raising up the occasional spark. Grace said nothing, sensing that the anger and frustration in her brother needed some outlet.
Eventually, Kevin tired of the game. He let the pebbles trickle through his fingers and he turned to Grace. His round, open face was almost scarlet and his blue eyes, strangely moist, seemed to stand out in his face as he cried desperately, ‘Don’t you care? Do you want to go home?’
‘Don’t be stupid!’ Grace snapped. ‘What do you think?’
‘How would I know? You never say a damned word.’
‘Well, you said plenty,’ Grace replied. ‘And what good, in God’s name, did it do in the end?’
Kevin didn’t reply, for his sister was right. When the letter had come he’d raged and roared. He’d declared loudly he’d not go home and no one could make him. Eventually, his granddad had sat him down hard on the settle and said solemnly, ‘Kevin lad, the man’s your own father. You must do as he bids you for now. But you haven’t to stay for ever. You can come back.’
His words were for Kevin alone and Grace realised her grandda spoke as if Kevin had a claim on the place. Yet Grace was just as bereft, but quieter in her distress, and what good would it have done for her to make a fuss as well? It would just be putting off the inevitable.
Kevin leapt down from the gate. ‘Come on,’ he said angrily – most of his words these days were angry now – ‘it’s nearly time for milking.’
Grace got down without a word and they went up the path, silently at first, busy with their own thoughts. Then Kevin suddenly said, ‘This is going to be my farm one day. Grandda’s going to leave it to me in his will.’
Grace stopped dead on the path and stared at him. Now she understood why
her grandda had spoken as he had and yet she cried, ‘He can’t.’
‘Who says he can’t? It’s his farm.’
‘I know, but—’
‘Who’s to take it on after him if I don’t?’ Kevin said. ‘Uncle Tom, married to Peggy Lunney, whose father’s farm is three times the size of Grandda’s farm already?’
Grace hadn’t thought about that, but of course he couldn’t. She remembered Grandda saying Old Francie Lunney was delighted when his only child took up with a farmer. The rheumatics had got him fair crippled, and young Tom had things mostly his own way and was in charge in everything but name. No, Tom wouldn’t want her grandda’s farm.
Nor, she realised, would Liam. He’d never pretended to be a farmer and, after passing his accountancy exams, was now in a high position in a bank in Dublin. Then there was her Aunt Rosemarie, living with her husband, Greg, above the grocery store in the town, and Kate nursing in a Dublin hospital. And of the younger children, Colin was training to be a vet and Nuala had it in her head to be a nun. It was sad, Grace thought, that her grandma and grandda had struggled to bring up seven children, and yet it was a grandson that wanted the legacy that had been the means of those children being reared at all.
‘You know why he wants us back, our dad?’ Kevin cried, his words breaking in on her thoughts. ‘D’you know the real reason?’ He didn’t wait for his sister’s reply, but went on, ‘It’s because I’ll be fourteen in November. He wants to put me in some God-awful factory, but I’ll not stay. I can’t stay, Grace. I’ll die in some factory. I’ll come back here when I’m sixteen and he can sod off.’
Grace knew if their father was to find out about Kevin’s inheritance he would do everything in his power to take it from him. Not to farm it himself. Oh no! That would be too much like hard work. He’d sell it, and without a moment’s qualm that it had been in the family for generations. And once he had the money the family would see little or none of it. The pub and the bookie’s runner would dispose of the money from the sale of Thomas Brannigan’s farm quicker than the speed of light.
‘But, Kevin,’ she said, ‘Daddy will never let you have the farm.’
‘He’ll have to,’ Kevin said, tossing back his head, shaking his light brown hair from his eyes. ‘Grandda’s going to see a solicitor. He says there’s ways to go about it so that our dad can do nothing.’
Grace hoped he was right. Kevin looked so sad and there was nothing she could do to make the situation better. So she said, ‘Come on, then. If this is all going to belong to you someday, you can’t be late for the milking,’ and so saying, she strode off towards the cottage, and her brother, without another word, followed her.
Annie Brannigan watched her two grandchildren come round the side of the cottage. She knew that when they left her home in the morning the light would go out of her life, and that of her husband, Thomas. Kevin, she saw, was making for the milking shed. It would be for the last time, because the children would have plenty to do in the morning before catching the rail bus, the first leg of their journey home. Annie hoped and prayed devoutly that things would be better for them at home than they had been. Maeve would never say, though she’d asked her.
She knew neither wanted to go back; Kevin had made that very clear. Dear God, she could see problems there because Kevin despised his father. He wasn’t too good at hiding his feelings either. He was a good lad, none better, and straight as a die, but he’d seen things no little lad should see and she had a feeling he’d stand up to his father when he got back. She could see sparks flying there, as he was a fine strapping lad too, not so easy to bully now, she’d have said.
Grace came into the cottage. She could have told her granny she remembered a lot from before she’d gone to live in Ireland, and most of it unpleasant. When she looked back, it seemed shrouded in misery. She’d often been hungry and cold and terrified, and when she was younger she’d only have to hear her father’s boots cross the cobbles to their door, or his bullying voice downstairs, and she’d wet herself with fear.
The memories she had of her mother, on the other hand, were good ones. She remembered the feel of her arms around her, and her lilting voice singing nursery rhymes or telling her and Kevin stories, and the clean soapy smell of her better than she could remember what she looked like. Even in the photographs she’d sent, she’d been shadowy and half hidden by the babies she had in her arm. Bridget first and then Jamie and now Mary Ann.
But, Grace told herself, things must be better now. Their mother had written them long cheerful letters all through the war and surely she couldn’t have done that if things had been as bad as before.
‘What are you thinking about, Grace, to have such a frown on your pretty face?’ Annie said, pressing her granddaughter into a chair in front of the fire and placing a thick earthenware mug in her hand. The tea was so strong it was orange-coloured. But still Grace was glad of it, for even with the door and window open, the heat in the cottage was intense because of the fire that had to be lit and tended every day.
‘Going back,’ Grace said, and added, ‘I want to see Mammy, but I just wish she could come and live here like she did once before.’
But Grace knew that would never happen. It was a dream and dreams were for weans only. She drank the strong tea and swallowed the lump in her throat, and if her grandmother saw the tears glistening in Grace’s eyes she made no comment.
THIRTEEN
Despite the photographs Annie had sent, Maeve was totally unprepared for the young man who got down from the train the next day at New Street station. Nor was she prepared for the young lady he’d helped down to stand beside him.
Surely, Maeve thought, they couldn’t be Kevin and Grace alighting. She always imagined she would feel a rush of love for them immediately and run to hug and kiss them, telling them how much she’d missed them and it would be like it had always been. But the two who stood staring at her across the platform were strangers. She didn’t know them, she realised, and you couldn’t hug and kiss people you didn’t know.
Kevin and Grace thought Maeve looked awful. She was wearing an old dress that hung on her sparse frame, covered with a shapeless cardigan, her legs were bare and her feet encased in a pair of flat laced shoes like a man’s, scuffed, dirty and down-trodden at the heel. Her face was as they remembered it, but sort of jaded, her skin so pale it was almost white and her eyes had lost their shine, so even the blue appeared dimmer. They seemed also to be sunk in her head and had black smudges beneath them.
Kevin thought his mother looked fragile, as if she needed looking after. Beside Grace, his mother looked like an inferior copy, despite the fact Grace had been incredibly sick on the boat.
Grace thought her mother looked ill. Surely no one could be so pale and not be ill. And where on earth, she wondered, did her mother get those awful clothes she had on?
Maeve had forced herself to walk down the platform towards the children.
Kevin stepped forward. ‘Hello, Mammy,’ he said, and bent and kissed her on her cheek.
Maeve almost recoiled, for Kevin, as well as looking like a man, spoke like one, and it threw her completely. Also the kiss had been perfunctory and lacked warmth, as if it were the thing to do.
‘Hello, Kevin,’ Maeve said, recovering slightly. ‘It’s grand to see you, and you too, Grace.’ She gave her daughter a hug and a kiss on the cheek, but didn’t clasp her tightly as she wished to. She sensed the girl’s reticence.
‘Hello, Mammy,’ Grace said as soon as Maeve released her, but she said it in a flat tone.
God, Maeve thought, this is awful. She forced herself to say cheerfully, ‘I’ve missed you both so much. You don’t know how I’ve longed for this day.’
There was a strained silence. Kevin knew he should say that he’d longed for this day too, that he wanted to come back home, but he bloody didn’t. He hated being dragged back to the grimy city, where the houses were crowded one against the other and factories belched smoke into the air. He’d seen it
all from the window as the train neared the station. It tugged on the memories he had of it all from when he was a young boy and he’d felt misery and almost despair begin to gnaw at him. It went too deep to give false assurances to his mother, who despite the fact she’d given birth to him and reared him for seven years was now a stranger.
Grace knew how Kevin felt. She was the one he’d poured out his heart to. She was the one who’d seen him tramping the hills, his eyes wild, or sobbing heartbrokenly when he thought he was alone. She felt for her brother, but she suddenly felt sorry for her mother too, for she looked so forlorn and lost standing in those ragged clothes on the windy platform, making an effort.
She had missed her mother probably more than Kevin had, but she’d never told anyone because she knew there was no good complaining about a situation she was unable to alter. But now as the silence stretched between them, she felt a rush of sympathy for Maeve. She was not to blame. Grace knew as well as Kevin who’d demanded their return and why.
‘We’re both tired, Mammy,’ she said by way of explaining their behaviour. ‘We’ll be all right when we’re home.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Maeve said as if in relief. ‘What am I thinking of? We’ll go home and have a feed and it will put a different complexion on it altogether.’ She looked at their luggage. They had a bag between them and two new shiny leather suitcases. She remembered the little grey haversacks she’d bought when they first went to Ireland, which had easily carried all their worldly possessions. She marvelled not only at the cases, but the fact that they obviously each had enough clothes to fill them.
Kevin saw his mother’s eye on the suitcases and said gruffly, ‘Grandda bought them, the cases. A sort of going-away present.’
