A Nest of Singing Birds

by A Nest of Singing Birds (retail) (epub)

  Tony stood up immediately, realising that it would be difficult for his father to sing the Irish songs he sang at parties, usually sad songs of loss and parting.

  ‘I’ll try “The Drinking Song” from The Student Prince,’ he said. He had a pleasant baritone voice and they all joined in the chorus, even Moira piping up, ‘Dwink, dwink’.

  Pat was delighted.

  ‘Fred’s talking about starting his Easter parties again now there are children in the family once more,’ he said. He took Moira on his knee. ‘You’ll be the star of the show, pet.’

  ‘Let’s hope all the family will be home by then,’ Maureen said. ‘They’ll all have tales to tell.’

  ‘Yes. The twins were in the raid on the Lofoten Islands, you know,’ Tony said to Chris. ‘God, what a pair! Des was telling me about when they were in training for the commandos. No one better suited for them, believe me. Des said they had to climb sheer cliffs with their faces blacked and a knife between their teeth. “It was the gear,” he said. They’re mad, both of them.’

  It was a pleasant evening but when Anne wrote to Joe about it, telling him that she had asked Helen and Tony to come, he replied immediately, warning her not to rush things. ‘I know you mean well, love,’ he wrote, ‘but Maureen and Chris have managed for so long because they have kept it so low key. Maureen’s principles give her strength. Don’t make it harder for them, Anne.’

  At first Anne felt indignant with Joe, but when she thought it over realised the good sense of his warning. A few nights later she went with Maureen to Benediction and as she glanced at her sister, deep in prayer, Anne was conscious of how much Maureen’s faith meant to her and how her own well-meant interference might have severed that lifeline for her beloved sister.

  Helen asked no questions about Chris, only saying that it had been a lovely evening and Moira was still talking about the tinned peaches and jelly.

  To Maureen Anne said ruefully, ‘I think that was a case of “fools rush in”. Sorry, Mo.’

  ‘Nothing to be sorry for,’ she said. ‘Chris and I appreciated it and we enjoyed the evening, but I think it’d be better if we didn’t do it again. But I’m glad you know about us, love. I didn’t like deceiving you. And don’t be hurt, Anne. I said that Joe knew, but – well, Sarah knows too. Mum knew about us and mentioned it to Sarah when we came back here after your wedding.’

  Anne was silent for a moment, thinking, then she said, ‘Joe came back here too, didn’t he? Do you mean Mum spoke about it to you and Joe and Sarah heard her?’

  ‘No. It was – oh, God, Anne, I can’t tell you,’ she said. ‘Oh, if only this damn war was over!’ She began to cry and Anne put her arms round her. ‘Don’t, Mo,’ she said gently. ‘I won’t ask any more questions and I’m not hurt that Sarah knows, honestly.’

  The next day all this was swept from their minds when a letter arrived from Eileen, saying that she was to be married by special licence.

  Eileen wrote first to her father asking for his blessing. ‘I hope you won’t be hurt, Dad. I know you were proud to give Anne away, and I’d love to be with you and all the family, but we only have two days’ leave. I’ll bring Whitey to meet you just as soon as I can and I know you’ll love him.’

  Pat was bewildered, unable to understand why Eileen could not wait to be married from home, but by the next post Maureen and Anne received ecstatic letters from her and tried to reconcile their father to the idea of the wedding.

  ‘She’s very much in love with him, Dad,’ Anne said. ‘And it’s quite usual for people in the services to get married on the station. Especially in the Air Force.’

  ‘But a lad we’ve never even met?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Dad, but Eileen must know what she’s doing. She’s been out with enough lads to know he’s the right one for her,’ Maureen said.

  Pat shook his head and blew out his lips. ‘I don’t know. Everything’s different. Your mum wouldn’t have liked it.’

  ‘She would, Dad,’ Anne said. ‘If it meant Eileen was happy. I know. The three of us could go to seven o’clock Mass on Friday morning then it would be like being at Nuptial Mass for her.’

  ‘Aye, and I’ll send her a few quid to get some nice things,’ Pat said, brightening. The girls knew that the ‘few quid’ would be a generous sum, and even if she was unable to buy nice things it would show Eileen that her father approved of the marriage, though he was unable to express his feelings in the letter sent with it.

  When Carrie was told she said she was not surprised. ‘Eileen was never one for fuss, was she?’ she said. ‘Not very romantic. I’ll have to find something nice for a wedding present.’

  ‘Not romantic!’ Anne said to Maureen. ‘Aunt Carrie didn’t see our letters!’

  Theresa was excited by the news and told Maureen that she had sent Eileen two tablets of scented soap and a box of dusting powder with a swansdown puff. ‘Not a wedding present,’ she said. ‘I’ll get her something when she comes home for that.’

  Anne had convinced herself that no harm would come to John and now moved through her days in a happy dream. She had left work and spent her time preparing for her baby, and reading and re-reading John’s letters.

  She went often to see his family. Mrs Redmond worked part-time in Mill Road Hospital, but John’s grandmother was always there and delighted to see Anne. She told her many tales of the days during the Great War when John was a baby and he and his mother had lived with her and Lawrie, as they sat together, Sally holding a skein of white wool while Anne wound it into a ball.

  After the long drawn-out years of waiting suddenly the war was going well on all fronts and the end was in sight. Joe wrote of the scenes when Brussels was liberated, of the joy of the population and their wonderful welcome to the troops.

  Joe was in the spearhead but John also wrote of amazing scenes he witnessed as his company moved through the countryside. ‘Some of the fellows talk of coming back here in peacetime, but it will be England for us, Anne, once I’m safely home.’

  She might have resented his calm assumption that she would prefer to holiday in England at another time but now it seemed nothing would affect her serenity.

  * * *

  Anne was shaken awake by the dreadful news that Eileen’s husband had been killed when his aircraft crashed in flames returning from a bombing raid.

  She wrote that she would prefer not to come home but Tony and Maureen got a few days’ leave and travelled to Kent to see her. It was a long and tiring journey across country and out to the remote airfield, and a wasted one it seemed.

  Eileen was dry-eyed and controlled, standing stiffly within Maureen’s arms as she held her and wept, and reiterating her intention to stay at her job. Her lip trembled briefly as Tony hugged her and Maureen kissed her again before they left, but she quickly recovered and told them unsmilingly to give her love to her father and the family.

  Eileen’s commanding officer took them to a room and gave them tea and tried to explain to them that it was better for her to remain. ‘She’s with girls who understand,’ she said. ‘Some of them have had the same experience and here she’s in a familiar place doing familiar work and I think feeling closer to Whitey.’

  Maureen and Tony appreciated her kindness although they could not agree with her. They were sure that it would be better for Eileen to be back among her loving family who could help her to bear her loss.

  The commanding officer had given them more details of the crash and assured them that Whitey would have died quickly, although his body was badly burned. His parents emigrated to Canada before the war, she said, and he had been buried in the graveyard of the nearest small village.

  They also saw the Catholic padre attached to the station and he took them to see Whitey’s grave. They had bought flowers in the village and they laid them on the new grave.

  ‘She could have had his body taken back to Liverpool and buried at home,’ Maureen said. ‘Then she would have been able to visit his grave.’ Tony said noth
ing. He wondered if Eileen would ever again come back to live in Liverpool.

  The padre told them that they must not think that theirs was a wasted journey. ‘Eileen is stunned now, poor child,’ he said. ‘Later she will remember how you came to her and it will comfort her. Try to realise that this is the best solution for her, to stay here. She’s like a wounded animal that knows instinctively how it can be cured.’

  He drove them to the station and they returned, sad for their sister and still not convinced that it was better for her not to come home. It was a relief to both of them to reach home and find Helen and Anne waiting for them in Magdalen Street, with a hot meal prepared and a warm welcome from them and Moira.

  ‘Fred’s been to take Dad out for a drink,’ they explained. ‘He wasn’t sure what time you’d come.’

  ‘We’ll have to convince him it’s the usual thing for girls to stay there in cases like this,’ Tony said. ‘Although I haven’t been able to convince myself.’

  ‘Well, you can’t do more than you’ve done, love, you and Maureen,’ Helen said gently. ‘Perhaps the priest was right and instinct is telling Eileen what to do.’

  It seemed in keeping with their mood when bitter fighting broke out in the Ardennes and hopes of peace were dashed again.

  Stephen came home for Christmas but it was a quiet, sad time for the family. Their only joy came from Moira, who was just old enough to appreciate Christmas, and from the visits of Bridie’s children and Theresa’s two little ones.

  On 19 January Anne’s son was born. After Helen’s experience the family had insisted that Anne was booked into a hospital and she entered Mill Road a day before the birth.

  It was an easy birth and Gerald John, as he was christened, was a large healthy baby with a happy disposition. He was fair and blue-eyed with a strong resemblance to Mick Redmond.

  ‘God help you, Anne,’ Mrs Redmond said. ‘If he gets up to half the tricks that Mick did.’ But she was smiling as she hung over the cot, gazing with delight at the baby.

  She told Anne that she could understand how she felt as John had been bom when his father was in France during the First World War. ‘Please God you won’t have to wait so long for John to come home,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we’re on the last lap now.’

  It seemed that she was right as the Allies crossed the Rhine and swept through Germany. On 29 April Mussolini and his mistress were shot and their bodies hung upside down in Milan. People in Britain were shocked but relieved to hear it and two days later Hitler killed himself and Eva Braun whom he had married the previous day.

  ‘The coward!’ Anne said indignantly to Sarah who had come to see her but Sarah thought the world was well rid of him.

  ‘That’s true,’ Anne agreed, ‘but I think he should have been made to suffer for the way others suffered through him. People like our Eileen and those poor people in places he overran.’

  She felt this even more strongly when the news began to come to England of the concentration camps that were discovered when the troops swept through Germany.

  Sarah and Maureen were now close friends and spent a lot of time together, and now that Anne was at home the friendship between her and Sarah was resumed as strongly as ever.

  Sarah and Maureen were godmothers to Gerald John and Mick, who was on leave, was his godfather. There were no other babies in the Redmond family and to Sarah Gerry was a constant delight and source of amazement. She spent as much time as possible with him and Anne.

  Suddenly, it seemed, the war was over at last and Churchill announced on the wireless that 8 May would be Victory in Europe Day. He reminded people that the Japanese had not yet been defeated but only people like Peggy Burns, whose son was a Japanese prisoner of war, dwelt on that fact.

  Anne was wildly excited at the prospect of peace and of John coming home. ‘He’ll see Gerry while he’s still a baby anyway, although he’s missed his first few months,’ she said. ‘Not like when he was a baby and his father was in France until he was about three.’

  She glanced at Sarah and said impulsively, ‘Here I am going on and it’s even more exciting for you, isn’t it, Sar? It must have been terrible for you all these years, but what a day it’ll be when Terry comes home, won’t it?’

  Sarah nodded but she looked self-conscious and guilty. She was just about to speak, to tell Anne how she really felt, when Gerry gave a loud cry and the moment passed.

  Many prisoners of war were now arriving in Liverpool and the girls in Sarah’s office made a large Welcome Home banner. The truckloads of returned prisoners drove past the office and the girls draped the banner between two windows and hung from the window ringing a handbell so that the men would look up and see the banner and hear them cheering.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if Terry was one of them?’ a colleague said but Sarah said quietly that she had received a letter from him and knew when he would arrive.

  The family were surprised to hear that he had written to his father asking if he could bring a friend to stay. The friend, Frank, had no home to return to as his only relative, his father, had been killed and his home destroyed by a landmine during the ‘May Blitz’.

  Eileen had been demobilised and had returned home but was very sad and subdued, still grieving for Whitey. Stephen arrived home on holiday and Tony and Helen came with their young daughter on the day that Terry was due. Anne and Maureen were already at home.

  Only Joe was absent, still in Germany. Sarah said she would go to the Fitzgerald house in the evening of Terry’s first day at home and his father was pleased. ‘Sarah’s a kind thoughtful girl,’ he told Maureen and Anne. ‘She knows we’re anxious to see him and doesn’t expect him to go rushing off to see her the minute he arrives.’

  Terry had asked the family to wait at home for him and they all rushed into the hall when he rang the bell with Pat pushed forward to open the door. Terry hugged his father and Frank followed him in, then without waiting for introductions, advanced on the family.

  ‘Hi, folks,’ he said breezily. ‘I’m Frank.’ He gripped Helen’s hand. ‘You must be our Maureen.’

  ‘No – no,’ she stammered, taken aback, then recovered. ‘I’m Helen, Tony’s wife,’ she said. ‘And this is – this is Tony.’ Tony and Stephen had stood back to let their sisters greet Terry, they were looking at him and waiting eagerly to greet him, oblivious of Frank.

  Helen touched Tony’s arm and looked pleadingly at him so he turned and shook hands with Frank then turned back immediately to Terry.

  Maureen was torn between her longing to hug Terry and gaze her fill on the young brother who had been lost to them for so long and pity for Frank who had no family to welcome him home.

  When eventually they were all in the parlour she said quietly to Frank, ‘I’m so sorry about your father. It must be a sad homecoming for you.’

  To her amazement he guffawed. ‘I’m glad to get away from the camp,’ he said. ‘But me and the old fellow never got on. Ted knows that, don’t you, Ted?’

  Terry looked over and grinned. ‘I’ve heard you say it often enough,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, the old man battered me when I was a kid,’ Frank said and laughed again. ‘We went a few rounds when I was big enough to stand up to him.’

  Maureen hid her feelings and plied him with tea and food from the trolley which Helen had wheeled in. Frank went on, ‘I cleared off to Canada as soon as I could. God’s own country. I’d never have come back to Liverpool only the firm sent me here to fix something up on the docks twelve months before this lot started, so I was just unlucky.’

  All the family grew more and more irritated as Frank interrupted every conversation they tried to have with Terry, saying, ‘You’re not telling that right, Ted,’ or ‘I could tell them more about that, Ted’.

  ‘I’ve never heard Terence abbreviated to Ted before,’ Anne whispered to Eileen but she seemed indifferent. It seemed that nothing mattered to her now.

  Pat was sitting with his arm about Terry’s shoulders, as th
ough he wanted to reassure himself that his son had really returned, but even his low-voiced conversation with Terry was interrupted by Frank.

  Finally Anne said firmly, ‘Why don’t you show Terry the good job you made of the cellar, Dad? It was a really safe spot for us during the raids, Terry.’

  He and his father stood up and Frank rose to follow them but Tony said quickly, ‘Tell us about the prison camp, Frank. Terry couldn’t say much in his letters.’

  Frank sat down again and launched into a tale of how he had outwitted the guards at every turn and been the mainstay of the prisoners. ‘Ted would’ve been lost without me,’ he boasted. ‘He was too soft, y’see. Didn’t know his way round at all. I suppose you’d all spoiled him, kept him wrapped in cotton wool.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Anne flared. ‘Our Terry was never wrapped in cotton wool, as you call it, and he wasn’t soft either. He wasn’t a hard knock, just a normal decent lad.’ Tony signalled her not to annoy Frank in case he used it as an excuse to follow Terry but he only seemed amused.

  He gave another loud guffaw and said condescendingly, ‘Shows how much you know, young Anne. Terry knew nothing. He’d have been a mark for all the wise guys without me to look out for him.’

  Anne’s face was red and she felt ready to burst with anger but she picked up the baby and escaped to the bathroom.

  ‘Your Uncle Terry’s got an odd friend, Gerry,’ she told the baby. ‘The cheek of him, calling me young Anne when I’m a wife and mother!’ But the baby just gave her his toothless grin.

  Terry and his father had returned when she went downstairs and the meal was ready. It was a special meal and everyone had contributed to it, either with points, coupons or hoarded treats. Mrs Redmond had sent sugar and tinned meat and jam from the food parcels sent from America by her sister and the girls were proud of the meal that they had been able to provide.

  ‘Gosh, this is the gear,’ Terry said but Frank seemed unimpressed. Throughout the meal he told them of his success at bartering with the guards or stealing from the farmers when they were sent to work on farms. ‘We’d be a lot thinner than this if it wasn’t for me, wouldn’t we, Ted?’ he said.