A Daughter's Secret

by Anne Bennett

  ‘I hear all you say and even understand it, but no one is thinking of me in this.’

  ‘Believe me, Molly, everyone who loves you has your welfare at heart,’ Tom said. ‘Everyone is waiting for and dreading invasion. Bide here a little longer until we see what transpires.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The first bomb fell in Birmingham on 9 August, according to the wireless and the paper, though Birmingham was always referred to as ‘a Midlands town’. After that, there were more sporadic attacks throughout the month. Molly worried about the people back home, but her granddad wrote that he and Kevin were just fine and that she was not to think of returning just yet.

  The first attack in London was in September and centred around the docks area. Tom was concerned for the safety of Joe and his family. However, there was nothing either he or Molly could do to help, and meanwhile life had to go on.

  The raids increased in ferocity in October and then suddenly the letters from Birmingham ceased. By the time October gave way to November, Molly’s letters to Birmingham had a distraught edge to them. Intense fear dogged her every waking moment until she felt she couldn’t bear it any more. She knew that she had to return to Birmingham, and without delay, to find out what had happened.

  Tom didn’t want Molly anywhere near to Birmingham, though he knew the level of her concern. Each time she mentioned leaving, it brought to Tom’s mind Aggie’s desperate flight and the nagging worry of what had happened to her that had never truly left him.

  Molly did her best to assure him that she would be all right, but as he couldn’t share Aggie’s story, her words couldn’t help him. The point was, his two sisters had been making for the same city. From the moment Aggie climbed into McAllister’s cart, and many years later, Nuala – in very different circumstances and with the grudging approval of her parents – had mounted the train at the station in Derry, he had never seen either of them again.

  He was terrified of allowing his slight, wee niece that he had come to love dearly to travel alone to that same city, especially with the danger of bombs toppling from the sky. But how could he prevent it? She was old enough to make decisions herself and her fears for her loved ones were no longer unfounded. She needed to know. Even if the news was bad she needed to know, but he knew he would worry about her every second that she was away.

  He was both relieved and pleased when Molly was able to tell him of her money from Paul Simmons, the man that her father had rescued way back in the First World War. Apparently he had been sending her money since she was fourteen years old, which she had saved in the post office. When she told him how much it was, he knew that, even with the fare taken out of it, she would have plenty to find lodgings somewhere while she sorted everything out.

  The fiercest air raid on Coventry, on Thursday, 14 November, only strengthened Molly’s resolve. The following Saturday she went into Buncrana to book her passage to England.

  However, she sought out her uncle at the pub by the harbour just a little later and, drawing him to one side, away from the press of people, she thrust an envelope into his hand that had been waiting for her at the post office. Tom noted that the scrawled address was written in pencil before withdrawing the scrap of paper from inside. It had jagged edges as if torn from a pad, but the cryptic message was clear enough.

  ‘Molly, come and get me. It’s horrible in this place – luv Kevin.’

  Kevin’s unhappiness leaped from the page and tore at Tom’s heart, but at least it showed the child was alive, or had been when he wrote the letter. That was the best scenario Molly could hope for.

  ‘Where is he, do you think?’ Tom asked.

  Molly shrugged. ‘I have no idea, but as soon as I get to Birmingham, I will search until I find him, and also find out what has happened to Granddad and Hilda, our old neighbour. I won’t rest until I do.’

  Tom nodded. He knew nothing would stop Molly now. ‘I see clearly what you must do and, indeed, what I would want to do myself in your shoes, and I will do all in my power to help you.’

  ‘Thank you, Uncle Tom,’ Molly said quietly. ‘That means a great deal to me.’

  Molly left the following Tuesday, 19 November. Tom had bought her a fine torch and plenty of extra batteries, a money belt to keep her cash safe, and food and drink enough to feed a small army.

  He’d intended taking her as far as the station, but as they stood on the slight hill above it and Molly saw the lights of the station twinkling, she would let him go no further. As he watched that stalwart figure walk away from him down the hill, he knew that Molly was taking a piece of his heart with her.

  Later, with his head reeling from the tantrum his mother had flown into when she realised Molly had left, he sought out Nellie McEvoy, needing the company of sane and ordinary people.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him, noting his sad and strained face.

  ‘Inadequate,’ he admitted.

  ‘Will you stop blaming yourself for all the world’s ills?’ Nellie said in exasperation, though she smiled at him. ‘What in God’s name could you have done that was in any way different?’

  ‘It’s just—’

  ‘It’s just that farms don’t run themselves, Tom.’

  ‘I know that,’ Tom said miserably, ‘but it isn’t just the journey and all and travelling to a country at war. What if the news is as bad as it gets?’

  ‘What if it is?’ Nellie said. ‘I am really not being heartless, Tom, but take heart from the fact that that young boy was alive when he wrote that letter. I am sure that Molly will be using that knowledge as a sort of talisman to hold on to.’

  Tom knew, however, that he wouldn’t stop worrying about Molly until he received a letter from her saying that she had arrived safely. All other news could wait, but knowing how worried her uncle was, she had promised to write immediately and let him know that she was all right.

  It had spread around Buncrana, as these things do, that Molly Maguire had gone back to Birmingham to see that her grandfather and brother were all right. Many townsfolk asked about her and at first Tom said confidently that he was sure they would hear from her any day.

  Three weeks after she had left, he was beside himself with worry.

  ‘Maybe she hasn’t had the time yet,’ Nellie said, though she too was anxious. ‘Maybe she is waiting until she has something to say before she writes.’

  ‘No,’ Tom said. ‘She promised me.’

  ‘Och well, you know what these young ones are,’ Nellie said with a dismissive flap of her hand.

  ‘Not Molly,’ Cathy put in. ‘She is as straight as a die. If she says she will do a thing then she will. I’ve never ever known her tell a lie.’

  ‘Nor have I,’ Tom agreed.

  Silence settled around them and each was busy with his or her own thoughts. Anything, just about anything, could have happened to Molly in that city bombed to bits most nights.

  ‘We must just wait and see,’ Nellie said at last, for there was nothing else to say. ‘Sure, she might write any day. Does your mother express any opinion about it at all?’

  Tom sighed. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Happiness.’

  ‘Happiness?’

  ‘She says Molly has gone the way of her mother. Dead and gone, and good riddance.’

  ‘Jesus, the woman must be mentally deranged.’

  ‘I think she is,’ Tom said. ‘Molly always thought it, and Joe. I mean, she was never an easy woman, and without Daddy our upbringing would have been very harsh indeed. Daddy wanted his pound of flesh all right, and we helped on the farm virtually as soon as we could walk, but he was fair. Well, to be completely honest, he was fair with me and Joe. Aggie had a special place in his heart and he fair doted on Nuala, as we all did. Finn seemed to irritate him and he often got the rough edge of Daddy’s tongue, yet I saw him sometimes look at Finn, when he thought himself unobserved, with a soft look in his eyes. I think deep down Finn was his favourite, but Daddy would think that was an unfair way to go on and so
would be harder on him because of it.

  ‘Mammy cared for none of us but Nuala and Daddy, and when he died it was as if something snapped in her brain. Just at the moment, I am so worried about Molly, and Mammy’s attitude is hard to take.’

  ‘I’ll say it is,’ agreed Jack. ‘I’d want to strangle the old harridan. Let’s away to sink a few pints and forget all about her for an hour or two at least.’

  ‘Aye,’ Tom said wearily, getting to his feet. ‘I’m up for anything that will block out my mother’s gloating face.’

  Birmingham wasn’t the only city to be bombed, of course. London was going through it too. Tom wrote every week to his brother urging him to take care. It was a pointless exercise really because not only did Joe work on the docks, which was a favourite place for some of the bombers to drop their lethal loads, but he was also a volunteer fireman, which was one of the most dangerous jobs of all.

  Not, of course, that Joe could tell him anything in his letters, but he didn’t need to, for the newscaster on the wireless would often pronounce how many bombers had attacked the capital and in which area the buildings were set ablaze. You didn’t need much imagination to understand the danger that Joe would be in, fighting those fires.

  Even Joe, though, was concerned that Tom had heard nothing from Molly. He thought that she must be dead. He had seen plenty of dead bodies since the bombing began, and he knew Molly would be counted as just one more casualty of a war that had already killed thousands of innocent men, women and children.

  He did feel a pang of regret for the young woman that Tom had described in such glowing terms, and also described the hellish life their mother had put her through. He wasn’t surprised, for if Molly had resembled Nuala even half as much as Tom said, then their mother would make the most of it, punishing her because she couldn’t get to Nuala. Joe wrote a warm and sympathetic letter to Tom, offering comfort and support while gently suggesting he should not raise his hopes of hearing from Molly.

  He wondered for a moment about Molly’s brother, Kevin, whom she had gone to find, and the grandfather who had been looking after him. It was likely the grandfather was dead too, but the boy might be alive. He had been over a month ago, when he wrote the note to his sister that Tom had told him about. Pity he had put no address on it, because he wasn’t that much older than his own son, Ben, just a boy yet, and now possibly alone in the world. God, he would hate the same thing to happen to his own son, and so in his letter he also asked about Kevin and whether Tom had received any further information, but he had none at all.

  Nellie and Cathy kept their hopes alive until Christmas. They had letters, presents and cards to send to Molly as soon as they had an address for her, but as Christmas and the New Year passed with no word at all, Nellie and Cathy too lost heart that they would ever see Molly again.

  The townsfolk had stopped asking about her as well, having drawn the same conclusions. Though many were saddened, Nellie and Cathy seemed burdened down with sorrow for the girl they had known so well, and they were often tearful.

  Tom was the same. The tears flowed sometimes when he tilled the soil, or milked the cows, and mixed with his sadness was guilt. He blamed himself for allowing Molly to go alone to Birmingham.

  He was glad of the heavy springtime workload. He was out from dawn till dusk, which at least ensured that he went to bed exhausted. It wasn’t just that there was twice the work without Molly; somehow it all seemed more of a chore. He hadn’t realised how much she lightened his days, and sometimes he couldn’t see the point in any of it. Breaking his back for what? His mother? And after her day, what then? Work and more work, and for bugger all. It wasn’t as if he had a son to pass it on to. If he envied Joe at all it was because he had a son.

  Then, in mid-March, he went into the post office one Saturday and saw that Nellie had a big smile on her face.

  ‘You look like the cat that’s got the cream,’ he said.

  ‘Better than that,’ Nellie replied. ‘I’ve had a letter.’

  Tom’s heart seemed to stop beating. Hardly daring to hope, he said, ‘Not from Molly?’

  Nellie felt immediately contrite. ‘No, I’m sorry, Tom. I should have thought that you would assume that. It’s from Hilda, Molly’s old neighbour and she— No, I won’t tell you.’ She lifted the counter. ‘Come through to the back and you can read it for yourself in peace.’

  Tom read the letter and was totally confused.

  ‘So what do you make of that?’ Nellie said, as he folded up the letter and returned it.

  ‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ Tom said. ‘Molly left here on the nineteenth of November, so where was she and what was she doing until three weeks ago, when she called on her old granddad’s neighbour?’

  ‘And where is she now?’ Nellie said. ‘She knows now her granddad is dead and her brother in some sort of orphanage, because the neighbour knew that much.’

  ‘What terrible news for that young girl to shoulder on her own.’

  ‘I know,’ Nellie said. ‘And think what that wee boy has gone through. Fancy your mother not only refusing to take him in when Social Services asked her to, but also saying there was to be no further communications between the siblings.’

  ‘That is desperate altogether,’ Tom said. ‘The child must have felt totally abandoned and yet you know I’m glad he didn’t come here. He would be one more child for me to try to protect from Mammy. I would give my eye teeth to know they are all right, though, and I hope to God this Hilda gets to know something.’

  ‘That’s what I am hoping for too,’ Nellie said fervently. ‘That letter came a few days ago, and I wrote straight back and said that we had not received one word from Molly since she left here. I told Hilda that we were delighted to know that Molly was alive and obviously well, and if she had any news of her we would be pleased to hear it.’

  ‘I should go over myself.’

  ‘Talk sense, Tom,’ Nellie said. ‘You can’t leave the farm and, anyway, what chance would you have of finding Molly in a city the size of Birmingham? Maybe now we have Hilda as a contact we will hear something soon.’

  ‘I hope so, certainly,’ Tom said, ‘because you’re right, of course: I cannot leave the farm, much as I might want to.’

  ‘Wait and see,’ Nellie advised. ‘Really, it is all we can do.’

  The summer and then autumn passed and Molly’s friends in Ireland were no nearer finding out where Molly and Kevin had disappeared to. Hilda too had drawn a blank.

  The war rumbled on. Then, in December 1941 Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing America into the war. As the year drew to a close Tom faced 1942 with little enthusiasm.

  * * *

  Tom came in stamping his feet, for the day was raw, the fields and hedges, seen now in the half-light of a dull morning at the beginning of February, were rimed with frost, and icicles hung from the thatch.

  ‘It’s a cold one, all right,’ he said to his mother as he set the bucket of milk on the stool. ‘Coldest yet, I’d say.’

  Biddy made no reply to this. Instead she said, ‘There is a letter there from your brother.’

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘I was under the impression that you had only the one brother,’ Biddy remarked. ‘That Yankee strumpet he married wrote it. Apparently Joe is injured.’

  Tom ignored the derogatory reference to Gloria, for his mind registered only one word. ‘Injured!’ he cried, catching up the letter from the table.

  ‘Not to be wondered at with the job he was doing,’ Biddy went on. ‘I mean, for God’s sake, what the hell does he know about putting out fires?’

  Tom barely heard his mother. He was scanning the letter where Gloria had written that Joe had been injured when a flaming building had collapsed on him, and that he had quite extensive burns, and internal injuries from being crushed. Tom was completely shaken by the news, especially when Gloria added that Joe was a very sick man and she thought the family should be told. Tom felt sick at the thought that he might actua
lly lose his brother. He turned to his mother.

  ‘Don’t you think that this is the most upsetting news, Mammy?’

  ‘News I expected as soon as he told me he had volunteered as a fireman,’ Biddy stated flatly.

  Tom gazed at her and his eyes narrowed in bewilderment. ‘Mammy, I have said it before and I shall say it again, you are as hard as nails,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you the tiniest bit upset about Joe and his family?’

  Biddy’s eyes narrowed maliciously and she almost spat out, ‘I am used to loss. It has been the pattern of my life. I had my man and my youngest son taken from me, another son is fighting for his life and my daughters are dead to me too. And what am I left with? A gormless imbecile like you, that’s what. That upsets me a great deal.’

  ‘So now we know where we stand, Mammy,’ Tom said, tight-lipped. ‘But don’t kid yourself that you are upsetting me by this type of talk. I have heard it more than enough. You have never made any secret of the scant regard you have for me. Maybe it would please you more if I left you to fend for yourself.’

  However, Tom knew he wouldn’t, and his mother knew it too, and that was the rub. While his mother lived he was bound to the land, and though he might fret about the brother lying desperately ill in a hospital bed in London, he had as little chance of seeing him as he had of flying to the moon.

  That night he sat down and wrote a letter to the sister-in-law he had never met, expressing his deepest regret at what had happened and assuring Gloria the whole family was in his thoughts and prayers constantly.

  ‘D’you want to put a wee note in yourself before I seal up the envelope?’ he asked his mother.

  ‘I doubt your brother is up to receiving mail.’