by Anne Bennett
‘Why go now, when she is dead?’ he asked in genuine amazement.
He was further staggered by Biddy’s reply. She said she was going to see the set-up of the place.
‘There are children, more than likely, and they are going to no Protestant to rear. They will come to me to be raised in the one true faith. I know my duty.’
Tom knew that his mother didn’t like children. It was clear now that her resentment against Nuala was as deep as ever, and any children Nuala might have had would receive little love or understanding. He couldn’t help hoping the marriage had been a childless one.
However, Nuala had two children and, once in Birmingham, Biddy wrote to tell Tom all about them. Molly was thirteen, and even more bold and disobedient than her mother. Her brother Kevin, at five, was just as defiant as his sister, as well as being totally spoiled. But she would put manners on the pair of them before they were much older. Tom had shivered in apprehension for the offspring of Nuala.
The townspeople of Buncrana mourned the passing of Nuala and her man, and felt sorry for the poor wee orphaned children. The Mass Tom had said for them was attended by half the town. Tom told the townsfolk that his mother was bringing the children back with her and he saw that many were surprised. As they said later, out of Tom’s hearing, they didn’t know that Biddy had a charitable bone in her body.
However, the whole business took longer than Biddy had imagined it would, and Tom thought he had never known such peace as he did in those few weeks when his mother was away. He could cook enough to keep body and soul together, and he washed things as he needed them, so he got by all right without help, though many offered it.
In the meantime, letters and telegrams were flying backwards and forwards. Soon the townspeople were aware that the wee boy had been ill and it had been decided to leave him in Birmingham with his grandfather. However, Biddy was bringing Nuala’s daughter, Molly, back to the town where her mother was born and bred.
When Tom saw Molly alight from the train at the station in Derry, he felt his stomach tighten as he gave a small gasp, for it was like his poor, dead sister had been returned to him, her daughter was so like her. Tom’s gentle heart turned over in sympathy, for the suffering of his poor niece was so very evident and he saw too that his mother disliked the girl intently.
Tom was soon aware that his mother intended to make no allowances for Molly, and yet as well as coping with the loss of her parents he knew everything would be strange to her. A farm on the edge of a market town was a long cry, he would imagine, from Molly’s home in a bustling city. And she had left all that behind, and the friends and neighbours she had had, not to mention her grandfather and little brother.
What had she come to instead? A malicious old woman, who seemed determined to punish Molly for the sins she imagined Nuala had committed, and an uncle afraid of his own shadow.
Biddy continued to heap humiliation and condemnation on Molly’s head, for whatever she did wasn’t right. This was apparent to the townsfolk, who had seen plainly how harsh she was with the girl that first Sunday at Mass. In the end Molly began to look forward to the quiet peaceful times in the byre with her Uncle Tom, finding it soothing to lean her head against the velvet-flanked cow and see the bucket placed between her knees fill with the white foamy milk.
It was in the byre with her uncle that Molly heard what had happened to the family over the years. Finn had died before Nuala had left Ireland, but she hadn’t known that Joe had emigrated to America, and Tom told Molly all that had happened to him there. He also told her just how his own father had died and about his bad heart. He said her mother was not to blame, and saw that Molly was relieved by his assurance.
Tom and Molly got on very well and yet Tom knew his company was not nearly enough. The point was, as his mother well knew, Molly should have been at school every day. Biddy, however, had decided she had more than enough book learning, and instead the woman kept her at it from morning till night. In fact, from the moment Molly stepped over the threshold of the cottage, his mother had seemed to lose the use of her limbs, for it was Molly who did everything, while she presided over her and found fault with every damned thing she did.
There was the matter of the letters from Molly’s grandfather and the next-door neighbour that Biddy destroyed. She not only forbade Molly to write to them any more, she wrote to the people concerned in Birmingham and said that there was to be no communication between them and Molly.
The way Molly stood up to Biddy over that shamed Tom for she was just a slight, wee thing and so many tragic things had happened to her. Yet she had stood stoically before the woman who had always frightened the life out of him. Molly eventually lost that fight when Biddy would not back down.
Tom felt that he had let her down, and it didn’t make him feel good about himself. He was determined to make amends and he spoke to the postmistress in Buncrana, Nellie McEvoy. She of course knew all about the letters that had arrived and she had even tried remonstrating with Biddy about the letters she sent to Birmingham, forbidding Molly’s grandfather and the neighbour, Hilda, writing to her.
‘I told her I thought it hard,’ Nellie said, ‘and got my head bitten off for my trouble. But I do think it is a dreadful thing to do, Tom, to cut the poor girl off from all she holds dear, even her wee brother.’
‘So do I,’ Tom said grimly. ‘And this has decided me anyway. I know that you have asked Molly up to tea tomorrow afternoon and I am determined that she will go, but I know too that I may have to stand against my mother to do that.’
‘And will you be able for that?’
‘I won’t like it one bit,’ Tom admitted. ‘But I will do it for Molly’s sake. God, Nellie, the child is desperate for company and your youngest, Cathy, and she are the exact same age, aren’t they? All things being equal, they would have met at school and it is my mother’s doing that they don’t.’
‘But we won’t waste any more words on her,’ Nellie said. ‘We’ll see Molly tomorrow then.’
That was the beginning of a deep friendship that Molly developed with the whole McEvoy family. She and Cathy were soon close friends. Nellie became like a pseudo mother to her, and Cathy’s big, burly father, Jack, acted as the father Molly also missed so much.
Tom insisted on coming over every Sunday evening to walk home with Molly from the McEvoys’, and he took to sinking a few pints with Jack in Grant’s Bar in the town, which he had never done before.
Tom had just never got into the habit of socialising, but now he decided a man could be too much on his own and he enjoyed the pints and the company of the men in the town on Sunday night.
He had also taken to having a pint or two on Saturday while he was collecting the fish from the harbour, like most men did. One Saturday the Guinness Tom consumed gave him the nerve to demand a wage for his work, and for the first time he had money in his pocket to spend as he wished. Biddy approved of none of it, of course, but then, Tom asked himself, when did his mother approve of anything?
In fact one of the things he enjoyed most about those walks home on Sunday night was the opportunity to get to know Molly better, when the friendship begun in the byre could be expanded on. She told him lots about her father, who had had a fine job in that depressed city. ‘It was because of the Great War,’ she told Tom. ‘Dad was a hero. Mom used to say that any who fought in that war was a hero like her brother Finn, but Dad was a real hero. He got a medal because he crawled into the battlefield to rescue an injured officer, a man called Paul Simmons.’
‘And did he survive it?’ Tom asked.
‘Oh yeah,’ Molly said. ‘Good job and all,’ cos he didn’t behave like some toffs did afterwards and forget Dad. He had taken over his father’s factory. As he had one leg shorter than the other, he found driving difficult so Dad would drive him places and then do anything else he wanted him to do. Mom said that if Dad hadn’t had a good, well-paid job her employers wouldn’t have allowed them to court, never mind marry. Just think, Uncl
e Tom,’ she went on with an impish grin, ‘I might not even have existed, and that I’m sure would have pleased your sainted mother.’
Tom laughed, realising how much he loved and admired his young niece. She had wormed her way into his heart, all right, and he welcomed the opportunity to get to know her better.
Molly was sixteen in February 1938 and began counting the days till she could leave the farm. Tom didn’t blame her one bit, though he knew he would miss her sorely.
Then Joe wrote to say that his mother-in-law had died and the way was open now for his family to leave America. They would not be returning to Ireland though, Gloria would never settle there, having been born and bred in a city. They would, he said, make for London.
* * *
Eventually Joe settled in a place called Tottenham and got work on the docks with no problem at all. He set about providing properly for his family again, but in his letters home he spoke often of the possibility of war with Germany in the near future.
He said he wasn’t fooled by Neville Chamberlain going to see Hitler in Munich in the autumn of that year. He came back on 29 September, waving a piece of paper in his hand and declaring, ‘There will be peace for our time.’ It was the headline in every newspaper, both in Ireland and Great Britain at the time, but Joe wasn’t the only one who was sceptical.
Christmas came and went, the year turned, and as the spring unfolded Tom began to feel that they were balanced on a knife edge. Joe saw war as almost unstoppable and wrote advising Tom to get a wireless in.
‘These are dangerous times and even in Ireland, it is as well to keep abreast of things.’
Tom knew his brother was absolutely right, and he wasn’t averse to getting a wireless anyway. When he mentioned it to Molly later that day as they ate around the table, she hugged herself with delight.
‘Ooh, it will be terrific to have a wireless in the house,’ she said. ‘The McEvoys have one and it is great entertainment. There are plays and comedy shows and music and programmes for children, all sorts of things.’
Tom smiled at her. ‘I have it mainly for the news, Molly.’
‘I know that,’ she said, ‘but no one can listen to the news twenty-four hours a day.’
‘You won’t listen to it at all, miss,’ Biddy snapped. ‘I’ll see to it that you won’t have time to sit and listen to any wireless.’
‘You don’t have to sit and listen to it,’ Molly said. ‘That is the beauty of it. I can listen and still do my work. In fact, working away to music helps to lighten the load.’
It was not Biddy’s intention to have the load lightened for Molly, the exact opposite, in fact, but she concentrated her energies on Tom. ‘Boy, money must burn a hole in your pocket.’
Tom had had a drink and that gave him the courage to snap back, ‘I am no boy, and when I ask you to give me something towards anything I buy, then you may express an opinion. What I do with my own money is my business.’
The Spanish Civil War had finally ground to a halt in March of 1939 with the dictator Franco as the victor. In the same month the Czechoslovakian people, dissatisfied with their government’s decision to give away part of their country to appease Hitler, began to protest. The government, afraid of revolt, asked Hitler for help in restoring order. His answer was to invade and take over the country. Tom wrote to urge Joe to come back to Ireland with his family before it was too late and war broke out.
Joe’s answer was swift. He said that people couldn’t just run away when the going got tough and that he wanted to stay and fight if necessary to prevent that madman Hitler from overrunning Great Britain too.
In May, he wrote of the Territorial Army being recalled and in the same month conscription began of men of twenty and twenty-one years of age.
Molly was glad that the McEvoys had worked out a subterfuge years before so that she could receive her letters, addressed to Cathy, at the post office.
The loving concern of her granddad and their next-door neighbour, Hilda, had sparked from the pages over the years, while Kevin’s had sometimes made her laugh, though with each one she was aware of him growing up without her, and she yearned to see him again.
All in all, though, the letters had sustained her through many of the bleak times, and now they were able to tell her how Birmingham was preparing for war. In July, Molly’s granddad told of the trenches being dug in the parks and brick-built reinforced shelters being erected. The children, Kevin included, were recruited to fill sandbags to line the outside.
‘He is more excited than worried about the possibility of war,’ Granddad wrote. ‘He sees it as one big game.’
But the adults knew it was no game. In August, Britain signed an alliance with Poland, which promised Britain would go to Poland’s aid if she were attacked.
‘Hitler’s armies are nearly on the borders now,’ Molly said. ‘Jack showed us in the map he had inside the paper last Sunday.’
‘Aye, I know,’ Tom said.
‘Granddad is going to get an Anderson shelter,’ Molly told him. ‘He said it’s made of corrugated iron. You have to dig a pit to sink it in your garden and pile earth on top. I would rather they be there than in the brick-built surface shelter. I don’t really see how they can be much safer than a house.’
‘I agree,’ Tom said. ‘God knows what Joe will do, for they live in a flat with no garden at all. Anyway, Joe said once war is official he is going to offer his services as a volunteer fireman. They are advertising, apparently. Foolhardy, perhaps, but then someone has to do these things. Tell you, Molly, I’m glad we got the wireless in. Even if Ireland is neutral we have loved ones that will be in the thick of it. We need to know what is happening.’
There was to be an announcement from the British Prime Minister, Chamberlain, just after eleven o’clock in the morning of Sunday, 3 September. What he was going to say was almost a foregone conclusion for the German Army had invaded Poland two days before. Yet Tom and Molly needed to hear the dreaded words actually said.
‘I am speaking to you from the cabinet room of 10 Downing Street. This morning the Ambassador in Berlin … no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’
Tom sighed.
‘So, now we know for definite.’
‘You knew before,’ Biddy snapped. ‘That is, unless you are a complete and utter numbskull. But it won’t affect our lives in the slightest.’
‘Maybe not you, Mammy, but both Molly and I have people in Britain that we will worry about.’
‘Joe has a perfectly good home here where they all would be safe,’ Biddy snapped. ‘If he has chosen not to avail himself of it, then it is his own lookout, and Molly has no reason to concern herself with people who were part of her past life.’
‘You know one person shouldn’t tell another how to think or feel,’ Molly said to Biddy. ‘And for your information, I love those people in Birmingham just as much as I did the day I left.’
‘Nonsense, ‘Biddy retorted. ‘How can you say that? You hardly know them any more.’
Molly hid her secret smile and after, in the cowshed, she said to Tom, ‘She really thinks that I have had no correspondence with my family for four years, because she knows nothing about the letters. I will never tell her, though, however much I long to throw it in her face, because it will impinge on the McEvoys and they will have to live here after I leave.’
‘Are you leaving?’
‘Not yet,’ Molly said. ‘Nellie advised me to wait until I am eighteen because she says that then your mother will have no jurisdiction over me and will not be able to force me to return. But that isn’t that long. I will be eighteen in February next year. I can go any time after that.’
‘I will miss you.’
‘And I will miss you,’ Molly said sincerely. ‘Isn’t it odd, really? I mean, I didn’t know you at all for the first thirteen years of my life and yet I have grown to love you so much in the time that I have been here.’
Tom s
uddenly cleared his throat and turned away so that Molly wouldn’t see the tears gathering behind his eyes. He knew that when Molly left, it would be like someone turning off the light in his life.
The war drew a little closer to the Sullivan farm, for the Royal Navy had commandeered Derry as a naval base, called HMS Ferret. Lough Foyle, which separated the British North from the Free State, was filled with military craft for convoy duty protecting merchant ships, and a company of soldiers was positioned at Buncrana to guard Ireland’s neutrality. Tom wondered what chance the few soldiers would have against a highly disciplined and so far invincible German army bent on invasion. He kept these thoughts to himself, though; it would help no one to give voice to them.
Molly’s eighteenth birthday came and went. In May Germany invaded the Netherlands and Belgium, and Hitler launched his promised blitzkrieg on Rotterdam, leaving nine hundred dead in one night. Knowing that what Hitler could do in Rotterdam could easily be done in Birmingham, London or any other damned place the madman wanted it to, Tom and Molly sent letters off to London and Birmingham, pleading with their loved ones to take care.
A few days later the papers were full of the hundreds of Allied soldiers trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk and France and the frantic efforts to rescue them after the surrender of Belgium. France fell towards the end of June and everyone was well aware that only a small stretch of water separated Hitler and his armies from Britain. The Luftwaffe began blitzing coastal towns and invasion was on everybody’s lips. Molly’s granddad urged Molly to stay where she was for the time being.
Molly chafed at the delay.
‘You can’t blame your grandfather for wanting to protect you,’ Tom said. ‘He hasn’t seen you for going on for five years. Although in his head, he knows you are eighteen, probably in his mind is the picture of you still the child that you were when you left Birmingham, afraid and sad and just thirteen years old. Probably the greatest thing he can do, in memory of your parents, is keep the two of you as safe as possible, and with you here he just has Kevin to worry about.’
