by Kim Kelly
Nell was as quietly pleased that the chain-link binding mother and daughter together, however it had come apart, was now a closed circle once more. She wanted her mother with her for the next baby, she wanted nothing more than for her mother to share that greatest adventure of life with her the whole way along. Nell wanted as many babies as God would allow, however they came. But no more would come.
Only another war did, and it would break and remake their little world, all over again.
NEWSFLASH
I’ve only just touched the tip of my pen to the page of my book, open on my lap, still wondering where I’m going to start my story, when the trumpets of the ABC news bulletin go off as Grandma switches on her transistor radio. It’s two o’clock. I sit up straight on the edge of the sofa, about to go and join her again at the kitchen table, not because I want to listen to the boring news, but because it sounds like she might have come back from wherever she went.
When I hear what’s on the news, though, I stay where I am.
‘The savage IRA sectarian murders of the ten Protestant textile workers in County Armagh a fortnight ago has caused the political leaders of Ulster to gather at the behest of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mr Rees,’ the newsreader is going on. ‘The killings, in themselves a retaliation for the murders of six Catholic civilians on the previous day, has prompted a meeting also of the Cabinet of the Irish Republic to discuss the worsening situation. The IRA in Armagh—’
Grandma switches off the news, clicking her tongue and saying something under her breath that I can’t quite hear; sounds like, ‘stupid habit’. Any news about The Troubles that go on and on in Ireland makes her click her tongue and say something under her breath, and I know not to ask her what.
She lights another cigarette.
I go back to starting my story.
WAITING FOR HIM TO COME HOME
‘I can’t sit safe out at Fairfield counting bottles of milk,’ Stevie said one evening coming in from work in the summer of 1940, and it was the last thing Nell had expected.
No-one from the Kennedy clan was allowed to join up with the forces this time – Dan, who was now the patriarch with his own plumbing licence and business out at Lidcombe, would not permit it. The boys could join the coast guard or work for munitions or code-breaking telegraphy or digging ditches out at Dubbo, but they were not to leave the country to fight foes for foreigners. Absolutely no exceptions. With every year that passed, their brother Pat, who was now a solicitor with a firm in Bridge Street in town representing striking wharf workers, ailed worse and worse in his lungs from the burning of the mustard gas. Pat could hardly walk up a flight of stairs without resting halfway, and if he lost his job the government would not pay him one penny’s worth of compensation for his sacrifice – not because the only reason Pat had joined up in the first place was to avoid a prison sentence for his part in running the betting shop, but because no ailing veteran ever got a penny in those circumstances. So it was decided that no Kennedy boy was going to suffer as Pat had, nor any Kennedy wife as Gwenda had over the years when Mick was struck by one of his black moods. No Kennedy boy was going to war.
Only Stevie wasn’t a Kennedy. He was an O’Halligan and so by definition often difficult to fathom: as much as his father had been incomprehensibly stubborn and belligerent, Stevie was as incomprehensibly kind and dutiful. In the months leading up to the war, it had weighed heavily on him to read in the papers that the Jews of Poland and Germany were being forced out of their homes, just because of their religion; it worried him, too, to think that the Poles themselves – his fellow Roman Catholics – were now being forced to salute a Nazi dictator. But it concerned him most that all these young fellows around him – bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and bonkers – were running off headlong into disaster without enough older blokes to keep them steady. Not that Stevie was any battle-hardened veteran – all he knew about any of it was his compulsory few months of cadets almost twenty years ago now, in which he’d enjoyed running around the bush out at Ingleburn with a bunch of mates, firing off old .303s at targets rather than tin cans, the sort of thing that eighteen-year-old boys do of their own accord anyway. And the sort of thing that Stevie himself had a fairly natural talent for.
So then, it was a fatherly instinct, and perhaps not having sons of his own to shoot tin cans with, that drove him to do what he did: join up with the Australian Army, at the age of thirty-seven.
And Nell was not happy about it at all. She’d never said no to her husband before, but she said it emphatically now: ‘No.’
Although he might have been mild in every other sense, Steven O’Halligan was fierce in his decency, and he replied to his wife: ‘I’m sorry, Nell, but it’s already done.’
There would be no further discussion on the subject. It must be remembered that this man was once the boy who had stood up to his own father at the age of ten and told him he was going to Sydney, to his Aunt Hannah, to be near his mother when she was almost at her end. He packed a bag and started walking the one hundred and fifty miles from Guyong – only one of the neighbours, Mr Graham, took him up to the train at Bathurst and gave him the fare. Now, the Dairy Co-op were giving their best accounts clerk a guarantee that he’d have his job back when he came home. Stevie was that sort of fellow: so decent that most others couldn’t help being decent in return.
He spent the first two years out at Ingleburn, barely twenty-five miles from his girls, training the young fellows in how to hit targets in the bush, and since the army didn’t like sending away married men with families to feed, as that would be burdensome for everyone involved, it almost looked as though he’d go no further. But then the Empire of Japan dropped their bombs on Hawaii and he soon enough got sent away. Not to rescue Poles or Jews, though. Sergeant O’Halligan got send to the jungles of New Guinea.
‘Practically not even out of the country,’ he reassured his wife on leaving, but Nell was far from reassured. She went into such a state of churning she could have been put to work making butter for the Co-op. For the first fortnight he was away, she smoked so many cigarettes, she’d give herself a blinding headache by lunchtime. But then she realised she had to pull up her socks and fight, too – for her sanity. So, she did the only sensible thing she could do: she went back to work for the public service – in the Department of Education, in the general typing pool. It wasn’t hard to get a job this time. With all the men away, all she had to do was tell one small fib on the application form, ticking the box to say that she was unmarried, and it wasn’t hard for Nell to keep at it, either. Her girls were all at school now, even tiny Diane just started, and each afternoon the little sisters would trot off like a line of paper dollies from Saint Michael’s school up the end of the street to the Convent of Mercy, to help the Big Sisters make soup for the poor. It was beneficial for everyone involved.
‘I don’t know how you’re managing to do it all, Ellen Mary,’ her mother remarked to her one Saturday afternoon, as she helped her hang out the children’s smalls on the balcony rack to dry. It was every second Saturday now her mother would come over to the flat in Petersham – it had to be because of Nell’s job – and at her mother’s comment just now and her rousing ‘Ellen Mary’ she was getting ready to sigh, taking it as criticism – for never having the washing done, for getting the girls too late to bed, for lying on the public-service application form and tempting the Devil in, et cetera, et cetera. Most days Nell felt she did nothing right, never her full attention on any task, always robbing Peter to pay Paul; perhaps the Devil had her right where she deserved to be. But her mother now put her old hand on her own and said: ‘My daughter, you are a Kennedy through and through, putting your shoulder to it, the way you do.’
Angels fluttered a chorus of alleluias through her daughters’ smalls at this high praise, and Nell had to look away for a moment to quell her emotions.
But, praise or not, it was just as well Nell had that job and some semblance of sanity to fall back on, as Stevie
went missing-in-action the following June, in 1943. Up until then he’d written a note or a postcard to her almost every week for over a year, unless he warned her he’d be otherwise engaged, and in them, apart from his words of love and encouragement, he mostly detailed only the dull, repetitive nature of military life and how the only interesting things that ever seemed to occur were the multitude of tropical diseases that you could pick up. She knew he was at least half lying – and she lied right back, not telling him about the job with the Education Department, or how terrified she was sometimes in the night, so terrified she clutched her rosary beads so that they dug into the palm of her hand. But one day the letters simply stopped. In their place came a series of telegrams from the Department of Army: the first one informing her of his death; the second unapologetically amending that a few days later to missing-in-action, presumed taken prisoner; and the third informing her that as a result of an error in accounting, his pay had been suspended – which meant that the £3/6s. he’d been sending to her each month also disappeared. She wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in the money – she never recalled giving it a thought. In fact, she would never be able to remember what she felt or what she did across those brief but intensely painful weeks, except that she typed a lot of letters about some changes to the New South Wales primary school curriculum, and that Carole had had quite bad gastro and had had to go to her mother in Surry Hills for a few days.
Stevie was eventually found: she received a telegram from the man himself on August the fourteenth, 1943, at three o’clock in the afternoon, saying only, Brisbane. Resting. It was a Saturday afternoon, but not a Mum-visit one, and she was alone when the post boy came. The girls were playing in the little yard beneath the balcony, under the mandarin tree there. Nell watched them for a while, leaning on the rail, and she knew from that moment that he was safe, that everything would be all right. She felt the warm hand of Jesus on her shoulder telling her it was so, and this was no imaginary thing: she saw the dirt beneath his fingernails.
She would never discover what had really occurred to her Stevie – that he and five of the others in his company had become separated in fighting in the Solomon Islands, caught up in the Japanese retreat. She would never know how close her husband and his comrades came to being executed as they put their hands up in surrender, the Japanese officer changing his mind and deciding his men didn’t have that second to waste to get away themselves. She would never know that the toll of this and all other untold horror he witnessed in the islands and in the jungles of New Guinea meant that Stevie had to be pulled from the front, and go back to training boys in shooting tin cans, in the bush in Cowra and Coonabarabran, until his nerves came right.
When he finally came home, at Easter 1944, she knew not to ask. She knew enough: he now smoked more than she did.
He told her in careful silence on the subject, ‘You don’t have to worry about me, Nell. There are plenty who’ve had a much harder time of it.’
She knew that was the whole truth: there were always plenty who were having a much harder time of it at any one moment.
Stevie was demobbed at Easter 1946, and that was an end to it. He took no joy from the bombs that had been dropped on the ordinary people of Japan to force their surrender, but neither would he ever buy anything made in that country – not for all the days of his life would he touch something he thought a Jap might have touched before him; not a shiny new shifting spanner, not a child’s tin toy, no matter how cheap they came.
He went back to the accounts at the Dairy Co-op. He watched his girls grow into young women, playing basketball for the western suburbs regional team and winning freestyle-swimming races for their school. His girls went to the best school they could afford – Bethlehem College, over in Ashfield – and they could afford to send all four of their girls right up to Leaving Certificate because Nell held onto her job at the Education Department. She was almost going to give it up – keeping up the lie of being a spinster seemed so awful with every passing year, especially when their eldest, Jeannie, got married herself in 1952, to Vic – but then her brother Pat died suddenly, from an asthma attack, they said, and Nell decided one lie was as good as another. Pat died of the injury to his lungs from German mustard gas – that’s what should have been written on that particular form. Pat was the brother who had insisted upon her own education, too. She didn’t know what to do with her anger at his premature and needless passing away, apart from keeping on at the typing pool, and never eating mustard on her sandwiches again.
Dear Brigid, Mother Kennedy, didn’t last many months after that. Her walk slowed until she could not take the stairs of her house, never mind the train, the last strands of faint auburn in her hair turned white, but she had been independent and dignified to the end. Her funeral was attended by all of her surviving eleven sons and her daughter, and their combined brood of fifty-two children of their own – their ‘full deck’, as they had become known at that time. There were seven little great-grandbabies in attendance, too. So much for her to smile down on from heaven, there was not one tear shed at her farewell. She was returned to her beloved Daniel. She was two weeks and three days from turning eighty, and they buried her beside her husband at Rookwood Cemetery, under a Celtic cross.
There was too much family and too many things always going on in it for grief to bite too hard that sad day – and possibly far too much alcohol consumed at the wake as well, as Mother Kennedy had always insisted upon moderation but wasn’t around now to make her displeasure known. Dan, now sixty-three years old, got so drunk his sons had to carry him home in a taxi.
As for Nell, the time soon came for her to give all fibs away in the world of men, too, as Jeannie was carrying the first of her grandchildren, and Grandma couldn’t be in two places at once, could she. If her own mother, Brigid, had been partial to a bub, Nell O’Halligan made an art form out of her own devotedness. As each of her daughters married – next was Carole to Brian, and then Beverley to Geoff – Grandma Nell soon found herself in at least three different places at once. Jeannie and Vic moved out to Campbelltown, where they had a small farm, and where Vic was a vet; Carole and Brian, who was an engineer with a North Sydney firm, moved up to Turramurra; Beverley and Geoff went to Kogarah, where Geoff was an assistant planning officer with the Cumberland County Council. Oh how pleased, how constantly, beaming pleased Nell was as she darted here and there along the train lines across all of sprawling Sydney, going to her grandbabies, knowing that their fathers were all good men with good jobs, and her daughters were content in their spacious, handsome homes. She’d made all their wedding dresses; the bridesmaids’, too.
She wasn’t so thrilled at Diane’s choice of husband, though. Diane, the youngest, took her time choosing and when she did, she married a foreigner. His name was David Boszko – and he was Polish, his parents having fled that sorely ravaged country after the war. They hardly spoke a word of English.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked her daughter. The last thing she wanted to do was sound like a bigot or force a rift, as her own mother had done, so she pried as carefully as she could.
‘Mum.’ Diane rolled her eyes at her mother’s ignorance. ‘We’ve been dating for five years – and I’ve known him since school.’
‘Oh?’ it was all news to Nell.
But it was true: David Boszko had graduated with the Physics prize from De La Salle College in 1952, and he’d been waiting and working to get himself in a position to ask Diane to marry him before he did.
‘But he’s only a mechanic,’ Nell whispered to Stevie in the dark of night, and she could hardly believe she’d said such a snobbish thing, either. Her snobbishness was diving only lower and lower, though, the more she worried: David Boszko’s mother was a cleaner at Camperdown Hospital, and his father was a concrete layer. ‘How do we know Diane will be well looked after?’
Stevie, as much as he sympathised with her worry, could only laugh at this one. ‘Nell. The boy’s a mechanic with a university degr
ee in automotive electricals, who’s just got his own shop open on Parramatta Road. I don’t think he’s too backward.’
And that was true, too. David Boszko’s parents had slaved to put him through university, and had even helped him get the lease on the shop – Boszko’s Batteries – right among the car yards at Strathfield, in prime position. He was the only egg in their basket, and they would do anything to have him succeed.
‘Besides,’ Stevie turned to his wife and kissed her on the forehead, ‘he’s Catholic. A good Catholic kid who works hard and doesn’t mind getting his own hands dirty. He’ll be the one you love the most.’
That turned out truest of all. Diane’s Dave would be the most considerate and thoughtful of her sons-in-law, even if he had a strange, deadpan sense of humour, and she could never tell whether he was making a joke or being serious. It must have been a Polish trait – his father, Leon, was just the same. Nell practised saying Boszko – boshhh-ko – and not talking to the boy’s mother, Marta, as if she was deaf. She quickly fell a little bit in love with Marta’s cabbage rolls, but Marta would pretend she didn’t have enough English to tell her exactly what was in the sauce. Best of all, whenever Stevie looked at young Dave, it helped him to believe that, whatever the reasons his own country had sent him through hell, it had been somehow worth it to see this boy grab his opportunities here with both hands, catching the sun in his strong Polish arms.
