by Anne Bennett
Dr Casey called to see her the day after the funeral, for he’d been there himself and saw the behaviour that so worried Tom. ‘How are you, my dear?’ he said, recognising himself what a fatuous thing it was to say.
Bridie turned deadened eyes upon him. ‘How would you expect me to be, Doctor?’
‘Quite,’ the doctor said. ‘Can I say I’m very, very sorry for this tragedy, Bridie?’
Bridie didn’t answer that and the doctor went on, ‘I could give you something to help.’
‘Help? Will it return my children to me, hale and hearty?’
‘Bridie …’
‘If it won’t do that, Doctor, I have no need of your pills and potions,’ Bridie said.
‘Tom is worried. Everyone is worried about you.’
‘I can’t help that.’
There was no more to say and so the doctor got up to leave. He did write a prescription for a mild sedative, which he said might help Bridie sleep at least, but when Tom gave her the bottle, she tipped the medicine down the sink.
Two days later, Mickey was given the all clear to leave hospital. ‘Can he come here?’ Eddie asked Bridie. ‘Can you see to him?’
‘No,’ Bridie said sharply. She hated being near children now, even her nephews.
‘Please, Bridie,’ Eddie pleaded. ‘I’ve heard that once your children go into care, you never see them again.’
‘There’s no need for talk of care,’ Bridie said. ‘Mammy will have both of them. It’s what Mary wanted. Take Mickey to her.’
‘Your mother will not mind?’
‘Of course not. It would be a comfort for her,’ Bridie said. ‘She’s lost a lot too, don’t forget.’
Sarah had been beside herself with sadness and regret that for years she’d refused to communicate with Bridie, refused to meet her husband, denied herself the pleasure of her grandchildren. And now they were gone, blasted to kingdom come. But there were still Mary’s two sons and she was well aware that any day a bomb like the one that had killed Mary, Sam, Ellen and Bridie’s children could wipe out Mary’s boys just as easy and so she welcomed Eddie’s suggestion to bring Mickey to her. She’d keep him safe and he was, after all, part of Mary. The reply she sent back by telegram told Eddie to bring Mickey straightaway and Jay too, as soon as he was recovered.
On Tom’s last night at home, he tried again to talk to Bridie. It was hard work – they were like strangers these days – but he persevered. The priest and doctor had both advised him to talk about the children with her. They said though they’d lived such a short time, they could, while lamenting their tragic deaths, remember the good times they’d enjoyed and it was a therapeutic thing to do.
But Bridie wasn’t ready for that. She’d locked herself behind a wall of pain and sorrow where nothing could touch her and when Tom tried, she cut him off. ‘I don’t want to talk about the children I failed to rear,’ she snapped out. ‘Not now, not ever. Peggy McKenna got her wish at last.’
‘Peggy McKenna?’ Tom repeated, bemused. ‘What has she to do with this?’
‘Everything,’ Bridie said flatly. ‘She’s cursed the children since the day they were born.’
‘But why?’
‘Why? Because I had an abortion that’s why,’ Bridie said. ‘She knew of it and said God would punish me by allowing something to happen to them and he did.’
The desolation was evident and deep in Bridie’s eyes and Tom wished he could pull Bridie towards him and wrap his arms around her, but knew it would do no good. Bridie was empty of any emotion but sorrow, and could accept comfort from no one and most definitely not him. ‘Our God is a God of love, Bridie,’ he said gently.
‘Love!’ she spat out. ‘You talk of a God of love that allows this carnage: the innocent, the old, women and children, murdered in their homes, crushed, or blown into pieces and you talk of love.’ She turned from him in disgust. ‘Peggy McKenna said God would demand retribution. I sinned, Tom, and never atoned for it, not really. I went on to marry you and have another two children. I couldn’t go unpunished. She knew that and, deep down, I knew too that it was only a matter of time.’
‘Mary said that woman was never away from the house,’ Tom said. ‘No wonder you hardly let the children out of your sight and couldn’t sleep at night and barely ate enough to stay alive. For God’s sake, Bridie, why didn’t you share this worry with me?’
‘What would you have done if I had?’ Bridie asked.
‘Why, had a word. Tell her to leave you alone.’
‘That’s why I told no one,’ Bridie said. ‘Because then she would have done what she said she would do and write to Mammy and Daddy and tell them of my pregnancy and abortion. The one thing she didn’t know was the father of the child, but she knew enough to destroy them.’
‘It was a threat, that’s all,’ Tom assured her. ‘She wouldn’t have done it.’
‘I couldn’t take that risk,’ Bridie said. ‘I gave her money most weeks to be sure.’
‘Money?’
‘Aye,’ Bridie said wearily, and added, ‘Some I took from the Post office book when I was short. And when I began work, part of my wages went to still Peggy’s tongue.’
‘Oh Dear God, Bridie,’ Tom cried, and he drew Bridie into his arms. She allowed him to do that, but kept her own arms hanging by her side. After a moment, Tom released her, tears running down his face, as he thought how Bridie had suffered for years for a disgusting episode in her life that was not her fault.
‘My life’s over now, Tom,’ Bridie said suddenly.
‘No, no,’ Tom cried. ‘That can’t be true. You’re a young woman still. We can …’
‘Don’t say have more children,’ Bridie cried. ‘Not that. I’ve had three pregnancies and nothing to show for it. That’s enough for me, I have nothing to remember of the first child I aborted, but memories of the others will never leave me. I’d not risk another child – what if God was to wreak his vengeance again? I feel I could die from the pain inside me. I couldn’t cope at all if it happened again.’
‘God isn’t …’
‘Don’t say what your God’s like,’ Bridie said. ‘No one knows and I’m not risking him getting his claws into me again. He can do what he likes to me – I can’t hurt anymore, but I will have no more children.’
Her voice was implacable, and Tom was saddened and desperately worried about leaving Bridie with her mind in the state it was in. ‘Won’t you think of going home to your mother?’ he asked her.
‘No, Tom,’ Bridie said. ‘Not while my children’s remains are here.’
‘But, Bridie, you’ll be all alone.’
‘It’s how I like it.’
‘Go on, for a wee holiday at least.’
‘No,’ Bridie said. ‘Leave me alone, Tom.’
‘Oh God, Bridie,’ Tom implored. ‘Help me, I’m crumbling away inside, desperately worried about you and brokenhearted about the children. Tomorrow I go back. Hold me, for God’s sake. Kiss me.’
Bridie seemed unmoved by Tom’s distress and eventually she said, ‘I have nothing left for you, Tom. Inside I am empty, but you can hold me and kiss me if it will help.’
But it didn’t. Hugging Bridie was like hugging a piece of wood and the kiss was sterile and chaste, reminiscent of their courtship days. At least then Bridie loved me, Tom thought. Now, he wasn’t at all sure.
He returned to his unit a broken man, not at all certain that if he were wounded or killed and a telegram sent to Bridie, that she had enough inside her to even care. He couldn’t load any of this onto Eddie when he’d lost his own wife, so both men coped as best they could, alone and saddened.
Bridie watched Tom go with relief. She knew she’d hurt him by her indifference, but she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d promised Eddie she’d visit Jay, but she had to steel herself to do so. But at least the ward he’d been moved to after the raid of 22nd November housed mainly adults; she could cope with that.
Bridie was visiting Jay the day after
the men went back when the sirens went off. She read the panic and alarm in Jay’s face and fully understood it, especially as he couldn’t be moved into the basement with his foot suspended as it was. Instead, they pulled out a heavy-duty wire bed protector to put over the whole bed. They wanted Bridie to go down to the basement, but at the look in Jay’s eyes she refused.
She got under the bed protector with him and held his hand while bombs whistled down, crashing all around the city centre, and she saw him flinch and felt the pressure of his hand tighten, his fingernails digging into her, when any exploded close at hand. She searched around for a topic of conversation that wouldn’t be too distressing for him, but strangely enough Jay asked about his mother. ‘What about her?’ Bridie asked.
‘Everything. Tell me what she was like.’
‘She was the greatest big sister in the world,’ Bridie said simply and sincerely and, as she spoke, the depth of her loss hit her afresh. Mary had been so important to her and she told Jay that. ‘She was always there for me, she was like another mother,’ she said. ‘She was good and kind and patient and loving. I don’t know how I’m going to go on without her – I will miss her so much.’
She couldn’t prevent the tears squeezing from her eyes and trickling down her cheeks and Jay put his one good arm around her neck and cried too. But it was somehow comforting to mourn Mary’s death together.
When they were both calmer, Jay said, ‘I wish I had a picture of Mom. When I close my eyes now I can see her, but I know one day I won’t be able to. It will be like she doesn’t exist.’
‘I’ll find you a photograph, Jay,’ Bridie promised. She held the boy’s hands and felt the emotion running all through him. Around them was the crump and crash of falling bombs and the explosions when they landed, but Bridie and Jay barely heard them, caught up as they were in memories of Mary.
Instead, Bridie told Jay of the childhood she and Mary had enjoyed in rural Ireland, and what it was like growing up on a farm. She went on to tell him of her brother and sister that died of the flu when they’d only been children.
‘Mammy and Daddy were so upset, I didn’t like to add to their problems,’ Bridie said,’ but I was only wee myself. It was Mary who saw to me then. She made sure I was washed and dressed and fed. She was the one who held my hand and that of my cousin the day of the funeral, when the whole town and half the county seemed to be in the church and nearly all of them weeping.
‘Even later, when I got upset thinking of wee Robert and Nuala and their dead bodies up at the churchyard, she didn’t urge me to stop crying, or tell me not to be silly, or expect me to get over the children’ deaths by a certain time. She would comfort me and often would cry too, for God knows she was sad enough herself.’
Her face hardened as she remembered her uncle taking advantage of that grief. But that wasn’t something she could share with Jay. Jay might have asked her about the look that had come over her face if a particularly loud bomb hadn’t then exploded with an ear-splitting crash nearby. It caused him to jump in the bed and he jarred his leg. The spasm of pain took all thoughts of the look on Bridie’s face from his mind. Bridie saw the boy wince and his eyes glaze over, and so, to take his mind off it, she attempted to take him back to Donegal.
‘Your mammy always liked the springtime best,’ she said. ‘She always said she liked everything fresh and new. The lambs are born then too and sometimes we’d come into the kitchen in the morning and there would be a baby lamb before the fire that we’d have to feed with a bottle.’
‘Oh,’ Jay said. ‘I’d love to do that.’
‘It didn’t happen that often,’ Bridie said, ‘and it wasn’t usually for very long, but Mary and I loved to look after the wee things. I loved the summer too when I was allowed to run about barefoot. My cousin Rosalyn would go off, leaping the streams and climbing the hills and thinking up all manner of games so that the days weren’t long enough for all we wanted to do.
‘Mary wouldn’t be with us then,’ she said, ‘for she was older and began working at the factory in the town when she was fourteen.’ She had a sudden mental picture in her head of Rosalyn and her sitting on the five-barred gate at the head of the farm, waving to Mary as she cycled down the road. She felt so terribly sad that she would never see her again.
Mary had been so important to Sam and Ellen too. Yet, though she’d been sad at their deaths, the colossal tragedy of losing her children and not even having their bodies to bury had overshadowed the loss of the others. She knew that Jay and Mickey would always miss their mother and both had been devastated too by the news of her own children, particularly Jay who had adored his little cousin Katie.
She hoped and prayed that Jay would recover sufficiently as soon as possible before anything happened to him, for the raids had not lessened. This one that they were sitting out now continued with the same intensity and the walls shook and the windows rattled. Bridie squeezed Jay’s hand and told him how she’d missed Mary when she’d gone to England to their aunt Ellen’s and how she’d resented his daddy for stealing Mary’s heart, which meant she would stay there.
‘I came to visit,’ she said. ‘I was just a wee bit older than you and frightened and unnerved by everything: the traffic, the noise, the people. God, what a scaredy cat I was then.’
‘Why did you come back then?’
Bridie had no intention of telling Jay the truth. ‘Well, I was only scared at first,’ she said. ‘Your mammy and daddy too made sure I enjoyed myself. We went to Cannon Hill and Calthorpe Park, the Botanical Gardens, the Lickey Hills. We went to Sutton Park on the train once and I paddled in the stream and took a boat out on the lake. Nothing was too much trouble and every fine day we were away somewhere. And then, some evenings, we’d go to the cinema.
‘Best of all though, I liked talking to Mary, I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed her. Sometimes in the evening we’d all listen to a play on the wireless together. Your mammy was expecting you then and she was so happy about it.’ Bridie was grateful to see a vestige of a smile on Jay’s face at her words, but then an explosion near at hand caused him to jump in the bed and he gave a groan as he jarred his leg again.
The explosions were all around them suddenly, and they heard the whistle of the bombs hurtling downwards and the thundering roar of the explosions. The walls of the hospital swayed and somewhere there was the sound of glass splintering behind the tape. The ack-ack guns continued to bark into the night, but the bombs kept on coming.
To try and distract Jay, Bridie told him of her journey from her home the second time. She didn’t touch on the reason for it, or explain the cycle ride to Strabane. She told him only of meeting Tom on her way over and how she met up with him again in Birmingham.
‘I felt sorry for Dad and Uncle Tom when they came home,’ Jay said, and Bridie saw the tears glistening in his eyes. ‘They looked sort of lost. And I shouted at Dad, I told him I hated him and that it was all his fault. I don’t know why, but I was sort of angry with him. I sort of blamed him.’
‘That’s natural,’ Bridie said. ‘You want to blame someone. Don’t worry, Jay, your daddy knows all this, he won’t take anything you said to heart.’
‘Are you sure he won’t hate me for saying those things, Aunt Bridie?’
‘I’m sure,’ Bridie told him.
‘Oh God,’ Jay cried. ‘I feel so miserable.’ He began to cry again and Bridie held him as close as she dared, stroking his head and telling him to go right ahead and cry and not to worry or feel bad about it.
Bridie wasn’t sure how long the two stayed entwined, but when Jay had stopped crying he was embarrassed. ‘Sorry, Aunt Bridie.’
‘Never be sorry for crying. When something so horrific has fractured your life, you need to cry.’
‘I miss Mom so very much.’
Bridie felt her heart lurch. ‘So do I,’ Bridie told him with feeling.
‘Will you come again and visit me?’
‘Of course I will,’ Bridie said.
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She meant it too, for both sympathy for the child, and knowing her sister would like her to take up the role of substitute mother, meant she would visit Jay as often as she was allowed to.
She didn’t feel the same, though, about the children at the Mission hall. She found it very hard to take being around so many young children. Their plaintive crying, giggling laughter or just loud chatter affected her badly and in the early days, a child only had to cry, ‘Mommy,’ for her to turn around automatically.
Father Flynn suggested she help mind the children and give the young mothers a break, but she found she couldn’t do that. They had tried to be friends with her at first, but she’d not responded and so now she was mainly left alone and she preferred it. She was so envious of those with children and if she saw a child cuddled close to its mother, she felt a throbbing ache in her arms and an actual pain in her heart.
Eventually, she found she could stand it no longer and she moved out of the Mission hall into an attic room of a large house in Belgrave Road that she’d seen advertised. She told no one where she was going and when her absence was discovered, Father Flynn was worried, for he’d promised Tom he’d look after her. He contacted Father Shearer, but he had no idea either of Bridie’s whereabouts.
Bridie’s new home was shabby; the paintwork peeling, the wallpaper hanging in strips, the lino ripped and pitted and thin moth-eaten curtains hung at the windows, which the blackout shutters covered in the evening. Grey-looking sheets and even darker grey rough blankets covered a stained mattress with springs poking through that sat on top of a dilapidated bed frame. An old wardrobe stood at the foot of it. Before the miserable old gas fire, that lent little heat to the room were two armchairs, as well worn as the rest of the furniture, with sagging seats and shiny arms. Two cupboards were set into the alcoves and behind that a small wooden table and two rickety chairs. A grimy curtain was pulled across the corner opposite the bed, in an attempt to hide the sink, gas ring and cupboards in there.
