by Anne Bennett
There had been no Christmas cards from home for any of them that year: it appeared Sarah was cross with Ellen and Mary as well as Bridie. There was, however, a card from Francis and Delia. Bridie would have thrown it in the fire, but Mary intervened and said it would have been Delia who sent it and she was a victim of Francis too, in a way. Inside was a letter for Bridie, chiding her for her irresponsible behaviour.
Dear Bridie
I can understand you wanting to leave the farm, but not why you did it in such an underhand way. I don’t think your parents will ever get over it.
Your father was killing himself on the farm, though Francis helped him as much as he could. But at last he’s agreed to have a man called Willie Palmer in to help him and the man’s wife, Beattie, offered to give your mother a hand around the house a few days a week. She deals with the washing, ironing and baking and some of the work in the dairy and it seems to be working, though your mother finds fault with everything she does.
Your mother is very bitter towards you all. You most of all but Mary and Ellen for their part in it too. I can only hope time will heal the breach between you and I wish you a peaceful Christmas and New Year.
Your loving Aunt Delia.
Delia knew nothing. She wasn’t aware that the man she shared a bed with and who had sired six living children had also forcibly bedded his niece and that that child had been flushed away. She felt almost sorry for her, married to such a man, and she’d taken no account of her letter, which had been written in total ignorance of the circumstances.
But the letter had brought to mind again the deal she’d made with Peggy McKenna and which Peggy referred to again every few days when she visited Bridie. When Bridie told Mary she was going to take confession and tell the priest everything she was horrified.
‘You don’t have to. They know nothing about it. Leave it so, Bridie? Let them think you’ve just come over for a wee holiday over Christmas.’
‘I can’t.’
‘’Course you can.’
‘I can’t,’ Bridie said. ‘You don’t know what this is doing to me.’
‘And what d’you think will happen to me?’ Mary asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’ll go for me too,’ Mary said. ‘They’ll know I was in on it.’
Bridie knew her sister was right. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘I see that it wouldn’t be fair to bring the priests down about your head. But I feel I must confess, so I’ll go into the city centre to St Chad’s.’
Mary gave a small sigh of relief. If her sister was set on this course of action, then she was glad she was not going to St Catherine’s. There were two priests at her parish church, Father Fearney and Father Shearer. Father Fearney was a tallish man with grey hair and wire-framed spectacles perched on a thin nose and behind them small blue eyes as cold and hard as pieces of flint. He had thin lips, a thin, rather scrawny neck, and a forbidding manner about him.
He saw his parishioners as full of sin and with no shame about them, no humility, no saving graces at all. He preached of it so often, no one was in any doubt about it. Few went to confession if they knew he was taking it. People said you’d only have to mention you’d forgot your morning prayers or let the odd bad word slip out of your mouth and he’d have you on your knees till the morning, begging forgiveness. God, what would he do to Bridie? Not that he’d be able to relate Bridie’s confession, but then he wouldn’t have to.
Father Shearer, the curate, was a different man entirely. He was younger and plumper, his face a reddish colour as was his head where his bald patch was growing more prominent every year. He had a benign, cheerful face with warm brown eyes, a wide nose and thick lips.
Father Shearer saw good in everyone. He was always the one to give a person another chance and seldom gave harsh penances to the penitents leaving his confessional box. But, in a way, Bridie would hate him to know more than Father Fearney. While the older priest would probably rip her to bits with his tongue, Father Shearer would just sound disappointed with her – scornful, disgusted – and she couldn’t have borne that.
Bridie called at Peggy’s house that evening and told her she was making for confession, but she was going to St Chad’s in order to protect her sister. Though Peggy would have preferred her to confess to Father Fearney, she said nothing for she’d heard some of the priests at St Chad’s were as bad as he was. Confessions were from seven to eight, and Bridie timed it to be in at the very end; she’d hate for the place to be full and all listening to what she had to say.
There was no one waiting in the old church that cold wintry night. Bridie knelt in the pew for a few minutes to pray and prepare herself and then, as there was no murmur of voices from the confessional box, she opened the door and knelt down on the hassock, her heart thumping against her ribs.
Father Robertson, on the other side, suppressed a sigh. He’d been preparing to leave when he heard the door open. He was cold, hungry and tired. His rheumatics were playing him up and particularly the leg he’d broken in his younger days. He shifted around to get more comfortable, but there was little room and he hoped fervently the confession wouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been three weeks since my last confession.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the priest said impatiently, and Bridie rattled through the usual litany of sins. Then came a pause. The priest suppressed a groan of annoyance. ‘Go on, my child.’
‘It’s hard, Father.’
‘God is forgiving, remember that. If you are truly repentant, he will forgive you anything.’
Bridie took heart at the priest’s words. She had no wish to go on and wished she’d never come, but then she’d have had to face Peggy McKenna. Anyway, she told herself firmly, to come so far and not tell the whole of it would be a waste of time.
‘Yes, Father,’ she said. ‘But to tell it all, I must go back a bit.’
Oh God, the priest thought, this will take all night. ‘Go on,’ he urged.
He listened to the story of Bridie’s upbringing in rural Ireland, a seemingly idyllic childhood, surrounded by loving parents and siblings and beside her, her uncle, aunt and cousins. Bridie stressed the closeness between the families and the special bond between her father and her uncle.
Father Robertson wondered where this was all leading when suddenly Bridie’s voice changed and, in little more than a whisper, she said, ‘Then, Father, when I was fourteen, my uncle began touching me and kissing me.’
‘Did you do anything to encourage this?’ Father Robertson demanded sternly.
‘No, Father.’
‘Did you actively discourage it?’
‘Yes, Father, I told him I didn’t like it and he was to stop.’
‘Did you confide in your parents at all?’
‘I tried with my mother,’ Bridie said, ‘but she didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. She warned me to make no mention of this to my father, because my daddy reared my uncle when their parents died and there is special feeling between them.’
‘But, despite all that, if you had confided in him, wouldn’t he have believed you?’ the priest asked.
‘I’m not sure, Father. I loved my uncle too. At least I did then.’
The priest saw it all. The child grown to maturity, teasing and tormenting the man who’d always been like a second father to her, using her budding provocative ways until the mere man didn’t know whether he was coming or going. That must have been the way of it, for if the girl had been completely blameless and been upset by the man’s advances, she’d have found a way of telling her parents. And if she was a God-fearing and honest girl, wouldn’t they have believed her before her uncle?
‘Are you a truthful girl?’
‘Mostly.’
‘And are you a good girl? Do you attend Mass and the Sacraments?’
‘Yes. Father,’ Bridie said, and then in an attempt to explain went on, ‘I was the only one left, the younges
t, and I helped my daddy on the farm and my mammy in the house.’
‘I see,’ the priest said. ‘Then I fail to see why you told no one of this happening between you and your uncle if you were as upset by it as you claim.’
‘It did happen, Father,’ Bridie protested. ‘And I did tell someone in the end. I wrote to my sister. She lives here in Birmingham and she came over to Ireland in the summer two years ago and played war with Uncle Francis.’
‘And did he stop?’
‘Oh yes, Father, until the night I was at the Harvest Dance,’ Bridie said.
The silence stretched between them and the priest said impatiently, ‘Well? What happened?’
What happened? How could she say such words, describe such things to a man of God? Her mouth was so dry, she wondered if she’d be able to speak at all but then she began to stammer as she explained the row with Rosalyn causing her to flee and how Francis came upon her in the woods.
There was no doubting the girl’s words as she described the rape and her uncle’s reaction afterwards. The priest felt a stirring of sympathy for the girl. Whatever temptation was before the man, it was a dreadful thing he did to his own niece. ‘Surely to God, if you’d gone home upset, confessed what he’d done …’
‘And what then, Father? I would have ripped the two families apart and destroyed my parents’ lives,’ Bridie said. ‘Then there would always be those that would wonder if I had led the man on. I told him if he ever touched me again I would kill him and I tried to put it from my mind.’
‘That was very wise.’
‘But not possible, Father, for I found I was pregnant,’ Bridie said flatly. ‘I was terrified, but felt the only one I could tell was my sister. She told me to come here. I couldn’t just tell my parents that I wanted to leave. As I said, they relied on me. They’d have been upset and wanted to know why I was leaving them. I hadn’t time for any delay, so one night, three weeks ago, I ran away in the middle of the night.’
Now the priest knew what the girl wanted, why she had come. She wouldn’t be the first unmarried girl bearing an illegitimate child that had come to him, panic ridden and distraught. He had helped several of them, finding a place for them in the convent run by The Sisters of the Poor in Handsworth.
But Bridie was still talking, telling the priest how she talked for hours with her sister as they discussed alternatives. She looked at the priest earnestly through the grille. He must understand how frightened she was. She quaked at the thought of telling him what she’d done. ‘I was at my wits end, Father. I didn’t know which way to turn.’
‘I do understand,’ the priest said soothingly. ‘You are not the only girl to feel this. I know of places for girls such as yourself where you could be cared for,’ the priest went on. ‘Run by nuns. I could put a word …’
‘No, Father,’ Bridie burst out. She was terrified now of telling the priest the whole of it. There was a sudden tension in the box that was almost tangible. Bridie lowered her head in shame and through the tears trickling down her cheeks, she muttered brokenly, ‘Over two weeks ago I had an abortion.’
If the priest had been shot, he couldn’t have reacted more violently. Any vestige of sympathy he might have felt for Bridie had been wiped out by her words. He jumped up, jarring his bad leg, and the pain intensified his anger as he spat out, his face almost pressed against the grille, ‘An abortion? You sit there and calmly tell me you’ve killed your unborn child?’
Bridie was anything but calm, but she answered, ‘Yes, Father.’
‘Aren’t you mortified by shame?’ the priest shouted. ‘You’ve deprived an innocent child, who’s never harmed anyone, not only of the gift of life, but of eternal life hereafter. Your baby will never be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Did you think of that?’
Bridie hadn’t and she wept harder as the priest railed on at her. She was glad of the emptiness of the church, that none would hear this torrent of venomous abuse poured down on her. ‘You will go on your knees and beg God’s forgiveness for this evil act you have done. You will remember to murder an innocent baby is the worst crime of all and you did murder it, make no mistake about it, just as if you killed a child, just as if you’d smothered one as he came from his mother’s womb.’
‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Bridie cried, the enormity of what she’d done suddenly brought home to her.
She didn’t need the priest to tell her of her selfishness, that she’d only considered her own welfare, discounting that of the child she carried. She was as low as she could get as the priest went on about the home he could have got her into and her child being given to loving parents who could not have a baby of their own.
‘A truly selfless act that,’ the priest maintained. ‘Allowing the child to live and helping a childless couple who’d love and cherish the baby you gave birth to, bringing he or she up as a good Catholic. Their souls would be saved.’
And of course Bridie could see that now. Why hadn’t she thought that way? What matter that the word was the homes were like prisons? Surely she could have stood a few months of that to not only allow her child the chance to live, but to also help a childless couple.
All her life she had respected priests. She’d attended Mass every Sunday, taking Communion each time as the priest heard her confession weekly. She was a regular attendee at other church events, Benediction and Devotion, and always went to hear the missionary priests when they visited the town. She never really thought about her religion, it was just part of her. But at the centre of it was the priest, all-powerful and all knowing. They had a direct line to God and without absolution from them, you’d have to carry your sins about with you in a soul as black as pitch. Never had a priest spoken to Bridie in such a way and she stumbled from the church, filled with self-loathing. The penance was nothing. How in God’s name could she ever atone for this despicable act?
She knew she was worthless and of no account, a bad taste in Jesus’s mouth. She wondered for the first time whether it was worth going on. She could throw herself under a tram and everything would be over. Her parents would think her a grand girl if she did and none would ever know what she’d done. Everyone would be better off without her.
She’d taken a step forward, an eye on the tram clattering its way towards them, when a firm hand grasped her arm and pulled her clear. ‘Careful!’ a voice said. ‘You don’t want to stand so close.’
Bridie turned and found herself looking into the gentle eyes of Tom Cassidy.
‘Bridie,’ he said. Bridie was surprised he remembered her name. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was at confession.’
‘Here? St Chad’s isn’t your parish church, is it?’
‘No,’ Bridie said, and gave a shrug. ‘I was in town.’
Tom let that pass. ‘It’s lovely to see you again.’
‘Is it?’
‘Of course it is,’ Tom cried.
Bridie thought of the things the priest had accused her of, the names he’d called her, and remembered that Tom had been in a seminary and, until recently, was destined for the priesthood. She knew he must never learn what she’d done. ‘I’m not a fit person for you to know,’ she said.
‘Isn’t that for me to decide?’ Tom said with a laugh.
‘No, believe me.’
Tom wondered what had happened to the girl he’d helped, the one he’d comforted on the boat and talked to for hours on the train just a few short weeks ago. She’d swept out of his life at New Street Station and he didn’t know if he’d ever see her again, but his thoughts had been full of her ever since.
Now here she was saying she wasn’t fit for him to know. He’d never heard anything so ridiculous. And whatever she said, he had no intention of losing track of her again. ‘Now come on,’ he said, ‘I know the type of person you are. We talked for hours, for God’s sake,’ he said. ‘Would you consider going out with me one evening? We could go to the music hall, or the cinema?’
Bridie shook h
er head. ‘You don’t know me at all.’
‘Bridie, stop it!’ Tom said. ‘If you think it’s too forward going out with me one evening, bring your sister along too.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘It doesn’t matter what it is,’ Bridie cried. ‘Leave me alone, Tom, for pity’s sake!’
And at that, Bridie pulled her arm away that Tom still had hold of and ran. Tom almost took off after her, but people had begun to look at them and he had many glares thrown in his direction. Anyway, he was expected back at the Mission hall before nine, so he reluctantly averted his eyes from the running figure. He didn’t know what was the matter with her; it was as if she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders and that somehow it was all her own fault. It was obvious, though, that she wanted no help from him. With a sigh, he turned away and made for the Mission hall, his heart as heavy as lead.
It was not only Tom that thought Bridie had the weight of the world on her shoulders. Ellen hadn’t known of Bridie’s decision to confess about the abortion – Bridie had just told her aunt she was off to see Mary – but she knew it right enough when a tearful, distraught Bridie burst through the door that evening. ‘What ails you, girl?’ she asked, drawing her towards the fire, but Bridie was crying too much to answer.
She caught Sam’s eye over the weeping girl she had clasped to her and he took the hint. ‘I’m off for a pint then,’ he said, taking his coat and cap from the nail behind the door. Ellen waited till the door closed behind him before she pushed Bridie gently into a chair and busied herself making a cup of tea for the two of them.
She said nothing till it was made. Bridie’s tears were spent by then, but gasps still shook her body and her hands trembled as Ellen pressed the cup of steaming liquid between them. ‘Don’t try to speak till you’ve taken a few gulps of that to steady yourself,’ she said. ‘But then tell me what’s upset you so.’
When Bridie did tell her about the priest’s outburst, she was incensed. ‘Bridie, love, you’re not the sinner in this.’
