A lot don’t like the sailors. They’re afraid of them. Especially the ones with the darkened skin. You’ll often catch a person staring. Sometimes I think they’re just holding back their hands from reaching out, to touch that skin, to see what it feels like.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the sailors. They told great stories, you see. They’d been to so many places, places you couldn’t pronounce. I’d stand there behind the counter, wiping at a glass, listening as they described islands with sand so white and fine I thought it might be like snow. Seawater so blue you could see right down to the bottom and check if there was anything coming at you, because the waters were full of fish with spines and poison and even sharks, huge big fish with giant teeth that would snap a man in two.
One day I saw a sailor who had shark teeth in a necklace tied about his neck. He handed it round the pub and we all looked at it in awe until some old fella said you’d see the same size teeth on a pike in the River Boyne. That was the jealousy, you see, the fear of the foreigners. Ah sure, what did he know of that lovely-looking sailor who’d captured a real shark and made a necklace from the teeth in its gob.
Jimmy used to joke and say I had a thing for the sailors and that one day he’d come out to the shop and find I’d have run off with one, never to be heard of again, except to get a card from Jamaica at Christmas. That made me laugh. It would only ever be Jimmy for me and he knew that, but it didn’t stop me paying heed to the sailors. It was their adventures I was after, not them and their broad shoulders at all.
I was afraid I’d forget those stories, so I started to write them down. At first it was only a few lines scribbled in a copybook. I wasn’t very good at writing, you see – really it was numbers you needed in the shop, but I couldn’t get those stories out of my head.
After the old copybook was full, I moved on to a lovely notebook, one with a design swirled into it on the front. I don’t know where Jimmy got it for me, but he knew that I liked writing and when he gave it to me one Christmas, well, it was the loveliest present I ever got.
I wrote things down as I heard them – not just the stories from the sailors but all the different things people were talking about – the dances and the merriment and fairy tales – and the sad stories too, of babies lost and children hurt and sickness. I wrote about life as I saw it in front of me, as it moved each day, slowly, until you looked back and flicked through the pages and could see a whole decade spin in front of you.
I didn’t show anyone my pages – they were for me and no one else’s eyes. Jimmy wouldn’t touch them, he was real respectful like that. I kept my notebooks in a box under the bed and, when the day was done, I’d take out those pages and I’d fill them up. It was my way of ending the day, of relaxing after the work was done.
Strange, isn’t it, the urge to write like that? And when I started I could barely write at all. But that’s the power of the mind, you see. I always believed in learning and not letting anyone hold you back or tell you that you couldn’t do something. I’d never let someone tell me not to do something. Sure, I’m stubborn as a donkey – Jimmy always said so.
The thing I like about Mrs. McHugh is her straightforwardness. She doesn’t carry airs and graces, she doesn’t get all caught up with whatnots and nothings. Usually.
I’m remembering now how I met Mrs. McHugh. It was Mick I met first, a great big brute of a man with shoulders so wide and a back so broad he could do the work of two farm horses he could. He drank with all the other dockers who worked along the quays, carrying and offloading, standing out in the weather, rain or sleet or shine.
The dockers always gathered in our pub. You had different groups drinking in different pubs, you see. Some had the carpenters. Others the tailors. The council men liked to gather in the hotel, posh enough for them, with their starched collars and cuffs and red velvet jackets.
We had the dockers and the ship painters and anyone else who did work along the quays. We were a bit up from the quays, mind, but they liked our pub. We’d formed a little community over the years and that’s how I got to know some of the sailors, from the trips they did in and out of our port.
My, they earned those drinks those dockers. They’d come in, soaked, having worked from dawn till dusk, lifting and shifting and hanging out by the quays waiting on the ships to come in on the tide. And they worked through the night too, turnings big steamers round so they could be loaded in the morning with cattle or turf or cotton or linen or whatever was being sold off abroad.
I always liked Mick. He had a great big laugh and smile. He wasn’t a good-looking man – you wouldn’t exactly have run down the street for a second glance at him if you know what I mean – but he was kindly and he was jolly and I’d say they shared a lot of jokes, him and Mrs. McHugh.
I used to chat to Mrs. McHugh when she’d come in to get the groceries. Before she went to work at Number 43, she worked in one of the big houses out in the countryside, but she liked it when she moved to the Thomases as it was close to her own cottage on the North Road. She enjoyed being down the town for the conversations and the socials.
She told me she’d spent years looking after her mother, lifting her in and out of the bed from when she was a young one. And when she died she got her job out in the country house this side of Slane and she travelled out there every day.
She met Mick then and I’d say he encouraged her to get something closer. Hard work in a big house like that and the travelling to and fro too.
I’d say as she got older she probably wasn’t able for all that housework she was doing in the Thomases either but she would never say anything or complain – she’d just get on with it, that would be her lot.
I listened to her as she talked about the staff that were leaving and not being replaced at Number 43. She was ahead of her time, was Anna Winchester. She just loved to have the new gadget or the most modern way of doing things and that meant hiring less and less domestics. Anyways, the way I saw it, they were just putting more work on Mrs. McHugh and her getting older and soon it was only her and Ethel left.
With all her straightforwardness and her getting on with things, I am surprised to see her so discombobulated over the Nanny. It isn’t like her to get upset – whatever this nanny is doing, it’s like she’s cast a spell over her.
My eyes wander over my patchwork bed coverlet, with its blues and blood reds, all faded. The blanket has been on the bed for almost sixty years, now washed every so often by the girl, usually after I’ve spilled some food on it, which happens when you’re bedridden and the blanket becomes your table for eating and reading and everything else.
I’m looking at it because Mrs. McHugh is on about the Nanny again, and I’m getting shockin’ tired of listening to her crib about her now. It seems there is no other subject for discussion these days.
“Mrs. McHugh, have you said all this to Mr. Thomas? Because, I’ll be honest with you now, you’re coming in here, week in, week out with more and more stories of what that woman is doing – and I don’t know what you expect me to be doing about it, in my bed up here. You need to tell him all this, not me.”
Mrs. McHugh, mid-flow in a sentence, stops and looks hurt. She sighs and looks at me in the bed.
“I don’t know how to say it. I don’t have any ... any proof.”
“Why don’t you write these things down?” I suggest, thinking of my own stacks of journals, with my musings and my notes and my observations of everything happening all around me. Now that I’m old I sometimes pull the journals out to help me remember things. To check if what I remember is, in actual fact, fact.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, looking all rattled. “Some of it’s too silly to write down, it might look stupid. He might think me stupid. If I could just catch her doing something or maybe even in a lie, then I’d have something to go on.”
“You could set her up,” I say, and I chuckle.
She looks at me aghast and I shrug my shoulders.
“I see her watchi
ng,” I say. “From upstairs. Every night she’s standing at the window looking down. A bit like myself, I suppose,” and I chuckle again.
“You’d never catch that one out,” she says. “She’s a cute hoor.”
“Mrs. McHugh! Such language! You’re getting old and contrary. Years ago, a young one like that would never have bothered you. I think you should bring your worries to Mr. Thomas. Sure haven’t you years of service? Why wouldn’t he take what you have to say seriously?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “There’s just something funny going on that I can’t put my finger on.”
“Well, you have my take on it,” I say, keen to change the subject. “Write and tell. Now to nicer things – what are your plans for Easter? Do you have a new bonnet or are you working on your old one?”
Mrs. McHugh looks down at her own hands and I can see the worry in her face. These last few weeks had been hard on her. Maybe I should be more gentle, let her prattle on and get it all out.
Maybe I’ll help her out, do a bit of digging on this Miss Murphy, see if I can find out a bit about her. It might help put her mind at ease, bring an end to these conversations going round and round in circles.
And it will give me a little activity, like an investigator or a detective. I was always nosy with a sense for bad news.
And she is bad news, this nanny.
Anyone can see that.
Chapter 10
The Move
They moved on a Saturday. The neighbours were sorry to see them go, but all were happy for them. Everyone wanted out of the tenements.
Some of the aul’ ones in the basement flats muttered that they’d have no luck moving on a Saturday and could they not go on the Friday? But he couldn’t take a day off in the middle of the week and he was lucky to get the day off at all.
Saturday was a grand aul’ day for a move. Even the winter sun was shining in the sky that morning, low and half hidden under the cloudy smoke in the centre as he and Aidan journeyed out towards Chapelizod on the mule and cart, laden down with their belongings.
He leaned back, feeling the light on his face. He’d done it. Lifted his family up, got them out of the tenements, given them a life in the countryside. The deal had been done, the money paid.
The excitement among the girls was something else. For days before the move they’d been agitated, giggling and laughing and messing until eventually he had to tell them to settle down or they’d be left in the flat all on their own if they didn’t behave themselves.
The cart and mule had to make three trips to transport their life to the countryside. The first time the cart was loaded precariously with the few pieces of furniture they owned – the table, the armchair, their two wooden chairs, and the dismantled double bed. The missus had insisted on a new mattress for the bed. “I’m not taking that stinking yoke with me,” she said, when they’d stripped the bed and could see that the mattress was thin and sagging and had questionable stains covering both sides entirely.
The second trip was to bring the children’s trundle beds and all the small things: the utensils, the kitchen wares, the few items of clothing they had, their bedding and his tools. The third trip would bring the family – the final journey to start their new life.
When he and Aidan got to the house on their first trip, the widow was there, dressed in black. She stood at the front door, her hands clasped together, a small case at her feet.
They pulled the mule and cart to a halt close to the front door.
“I’ve left you some furniture,” she said as they dismounted.
He went into the house with her to inspect the donated belongings and was surprised to see that the rooms looked the same as when he’d first viewed the house. There were wardrobes and a chest of drawers, beds in the rooms, and in the kitchen she’d left the utensils and cooking pots.
“Don’t you need these?” he asked. “For your new house?”
“Oh, I’ve no need,” she said. “And, sure, couldn’t your family be doing with it more than a little old widow like me?”
She was far from old – she was younger than him. He would have put her in her late twenties maybe.
“Where will you be moving to?” he asked.
“I’ll probably settle with family up north.”
He felt sorry for her, young and widowed, the two empty cots upstairs. He wanted to tell her to take the furniture with her, to sell maybe, but then he thought about his own family, how they had five children now with maybe more to come, God willing. It would be lovely to place a new babba into a fine cot like one of those upstairs.
She handed him a set of keys.
“I hope you will be happy here.”
“Thank you,” he said, thinking how the house had not been so kind to her.
She bid him goodbye and walked off without a backward glance.
“Could I offer you a lift?” he called after her. “We’re going that way anyway?”
She turned, looked at the cart and hesitated. Then she walked back.
He helped her climb up to the bench at the front.
He set about loading the cart, Aidan by his side, keen to do his bit.
He locked the front door after they’d managed to get everything inside.
Climbing up beside the woman, he slapped the mule with the reins and they set off.
She was quiet, clutching her brown case to her chest, a small neat hat pinned to her head. He tried to lure her into conversation, to ask about the area, the neighbours, the best place to buy milk, but apart from answering his questions politely she barely spoke at all.
Aidan was uncomfortable, sitting the other side of her, rubbing his hands to keep warm.
“If I were you,” she said finally, “I’d keep myself to myself. There’s a lot of people poking their noses in round here. They might look like they mean well, and they might come over ever so nice, but my advice would be to keep to yourselves, don’t tell anyone your business and don’t be letting them in that house for a look around. Nosey parkers are all they are. Keep yourselves to yourselves and you’ll be happier for it.”
Her words sounded strange to him. In his block, everyone knew everyone’s business. All the women chatted, day and night, on the doorsteps, in the hall, by each other’s fires. He couldn’t imagine not talking to and getting to know the people they were living beside.
The thought struck him for the first time that maybe this change, this upheaval, might be harder than he expected. It could be that they’d be lonely, that they’d miss their friends and the company in the block.
“I’ll keep that in mind, thank you,” he said.
When they got to the street where the train station was, he reined in the mule and she climbed down, said goodbye and took off walking.
She could have been anyone, he thought, as she blended into the crowd. She could be a nurse or a shop girl or a seamstress or schoolteacher. She could be anyone with her prim ways and her straight back and her little hat perched on her head.
They made their way through the city, weaving through the traffic that was building, to pick up the second load of their belongings. He couldn’t wait until the third journey when his wife and children would climb aboard, with smiles and laughter and maybe even a song to help them on their way.
Chapter 11
Mrs. McHugh
Friday. She was going to bring her concerns to him today. She wouldn’t be nervous. She had been a bad choice, the Nanny, a hasty one, that much was evident now.
She would even offer to fill the gap until they found someone new. Someone more suitable. Someone who didn’t act like she was lady of the house and she only the help. It must have been the grief. Mr. Thomas was under a cloud, in a daze and couldn’t see what was happening right in front of him.
Going beyond her station, she wrote on a piece of paper.
She had taken Betty’s advice and written down her grievances. All this moving into a guest bedroom and then setting up home as if she belonged there.
Bossing her around, ordering meals and baby things, expecting to be waited on hand and foot. Who did she think she was?
Being rude, she jotted down. Giving her the cold shoulder. Not speaking to her, as if she were invisible. It was unsettling.
The third item she wrote down was the thing that bothered her the most. It was also the hardest to explain because on the outside things seemed to be fine. But Mrs. McHugh knew that there was something amiss with the child. She was far too quiet since the Nanny arrived. Remarkably quiet.
Baby poorly, she wrote. It was all she could think of to say, because it wasn’t as though the child had a fever or cried with colic or anything like that. The problem, as she saw it, was that the baby hardly cried at all. It was always sleeping. And she felt the baby was losing weight – she’d like to get a scales and have the baby checked.
She had made an appointment with the doctor for this afternoon, when the Nanny was on her half-day and Mr. Thomas was back at the office. She’d talk to him before dinner, just before the Nanny came back. She’d have the diagnosis and the conversation with the doctor then – words from a medical man, proof for her worries and fears.
Part of her was looking forward to the revelation, to finally get everything out that had been bothering her. To be able to tell Betty this Wednesday that she’d finally addressed the situation. It would make a great hour’s chat altogether.
But in the way it happened, in the end, it wasn’t she who asked to take Mr. Thomas aside, it was he who called her. Her first indication that there was something wrong was when the smirking Nanny came to the kitchen to get her, after Mr. Thomas had his lunch, just before the Nanny was to take her half-day.
“Himself wants to talk to you,” she said.
Mrs. McHugh was in the back hall, inspecting a set of shoes Ethel had been given to polish.
The Nanny At Number 43 Page 6
