Pack Up Your Troubles

At first Maeve and Brendan were blissfully happy. For Brendan, little had changed except that now when he tottered home from the pub, he had a nice spot of sex thrown in after supper, and Maeve was always as eager as he was. Maeve waited on him hand and foot, much as his mother had done, and took joy in doing so, for she loved him very much.

Brendan had a good, well-paid job at Samuel Heath and Sons, the brass works in Leopold Street. Maeve considered them both very lucky with so many out of work at that time. When Brendan told her where he worked Maeve remembered the couple that had been kind to her on the ferry when she’d been so sick. That man had said he was a brass worker too. It seemed like a lucky omen that her husband worked in the same industry.

Mr Dolamartis was loath to let Maeve go and said he had no objection to her continuing work after her marriage. The flat was cramped for the two of them, but Brendan’s mother said that many couples started on worse, and Maeve knew she spoke the truth.

Maeve was delighted to find herself pregnant when she and Brendan had been married six months. In her brief but passionate courtship, the subject of children had never been discussed. She’d barely noticed his indifference to any references she’d made to her brothers and sisters back home in Ireland. She’d met none of his nieces and nephews till the wedding and there had been virtually no contact since because Maeve worked such long and unsociable hours.

She’d always presumed the natural progression in marriage was children. She longed to be a mother and hold Brendan’s child in her arms, and thought he would be equally pleased. But Brendan raved and shouted, telling her she was a stupid cow and the pregnancy was all her fault, and when, in tears because of the onslaught and not at all sure what she had done to deserve it, she remonstrated with him, he punched her in the face. Maeve gave a cry of alarm and put her hand up to ward off further blows, and tasted blood in her mouth.

Brendan saw the pleasant life they’d been enjoying slipping away from them. Like his father’s, his life would turn sour and he’d have a child every bloody year bleeding him dry. He suddenly felt so hopeless about the future that he’d lashed out at Maeve.

Now he couldn’t look at her bloodstained face; he couldn’t believe he’d done that to his lovely beautiful Maeve. He went off to the pub, knowing his brothers would make fun of him when he told them the news and remind him they’d told him not to bother getting married. God, they’d say, hadn’t he the life of Riley already? Just at that moment Brendan thought life was a bloody bitch and women the biggest bitches of all. Temptresses all of them, and Maeve no better than the rest.

Despite his brothers’ taunts that evening, Brendan was bitterly ashamed of himself for what he had done. He thought about it all night and apologised to Maeve the next day. He told her he loved her and said he’d been shocked by the news that he was going to be a father and he’d lashed out in frustration. He said it hadn’t been how they’d planned things. Maeve knew it hadn’t, but thought Brendan must have known the passionate lovemaking they indulged in so often would eventually result in a baby. But she didn’t blame her husband, feeling that in some way it must have been partly her fault, so she kissed him and told him that it was all right, confident that it wouldn’t happen again.

Yet as her pregnancy had continued, Brendan often clouted Maeve, usually after he’d been drinking. She was far too ashamed to tell anyone about it and always thought up an excuse to explain the bruises that could be seen. And Brendan was always so sorry afterwards, full of remorse. Anyway, she thought, she must be at least partly to blame because Brendan was not the same man she’d courted or the same as he’d been in the early months of their marriage and she felt ashamed and saddened. Maeve would always forgive him and believe him when he assured her it wouldn’t happen again.

As the birth got closer, Maeve knew she’d have to give up her job and therefore the flat too. Everyone was keeping an eye out for a place for them, and when she heard of the vacant back-to-back house in a court off Latimer Street in the Horse Fair, she’d been delighted. She was seven months pregnant then and felt the new house would be a fresh start for them both.

She told herself it was probably the cramped conditions of the flat getting to Brendan, causing him to hit out. His mother, Lily, though Maeve had not breathed a word of Brendan’s violence towards her, said any man would be annoyed to see his wife working the hours Maeve did. ‘You should be at home, dear,’ she said, ‘looking after your man properly.’ Maeve immediately felt guilty that she’d been neglecting her husband and resolved to try harder to be a model wife.

Mr Dolamartis, in a fit of generosity at losing Maeve, had found her a second-hand gas cooker and a fellow to fit it in her new home, and Maeve had been thrilled with it. However, money was tighter than ever, for not only were Maeve’s wages lost, but now they had to find the rent and money for the gas meter for the cooker and the lamps, and for coal too, for they moved in the middle of September and the evenings were often chilly.

Added to that, there were things to buy for the baby. The food bills had increased too, now that they couldn’t be supplemented by café fare, and Brendan in consequence had to part with more of his wages. No longer were there tempting suppers for him when he got home from the pub. Sometimes, indeed, there was nothing at all, not that he had that much money to spend in the pub either.

Elsie Phillips, who lived in the house adjoining Maeve’s, had been a tower of strength to her since she’d moved in. Maeve was glad of it, for since the move Brendan had become morose and moody, and often snapped at Maeve for very little. Without Elsie Maeve would have been depressed by the whole situation.

Elsie was very fond of Maeve. She and her husband, Alf, had never had children. Early in their marriage it hadn’t mattered much, for Elsie had her hands full with her mother, who after years of caring for her husband, who had TB, eventually became ill herself with a tumour in the stomach.

Elsie tended to her mother in a bed brought downstairs and her father coughing his guts up in the bedroom above. She and Alf had the attic and she often wondered how she’d cope if she became pregnant, and at the time thanked God that she hadn’t. Two years later, all that she had of her parents were the two wooden crosses in the churchyard. After they’d been married for seven more childless years, Elsie mentioned to Alf that perhaps they should see the doctor, but Alf said he was reluctant to discuss anything so personal. The priest Elsie went to for advice told her she had to be content with whatever God sent and if he intended her to be childless then she had to be satisfied with it. She hadn’t ever been satisfied, but as she was unable to change the situation she had to accept it.

But when a heavily pregnant Maeve Hogan moved in next door to her some years later, Elsie’s maternal instincts rose to the fore. Maeve was only nineteen, her twentieth birthday being in late December, and could have been Elsie’s own daughter. Maeve, often confused and made unhappy by Brendan’s behaviour, and missing her own mother, found Elsie’s company very welcome indeed.

A strong friendship grew between them, and it had been Elsie’s hand that Maeve had clung to as her son, Kevin, was born in November 1931, while Brendan went on a drinking binge and disappeared for two days. He returned looking like death, without a word of explanation or apology and took no notice of his infant son.

In fact Brendan’s indifference towards Kevin seemed to be echoed among all his family, and even Maeve’s uncle and aunt. Letters of congratulation from Ireland were all well and good, but not the same as her family visiting and taking delight in the child. So Maeve was glad of Elsie’s support. She knew she’d get little from Brendan and she thanked God that she had such a kind and caring neighbour.

THREE

Brendan hated the child who’d supplanted him. One day, being unused to the demands of a young baby, Maeve hadn’t quite finished feeding Kevin when Brendan walked in the door. He watched his son tugging at his wife’s breasts and was so consumed by jealousy that he shook.

He strode across the room and dragged the child so roughly from Maeve that he began to wail, and Maeve got to her feet, terrified Brendan would hurt him. Not that he didn’t want to, for he knew Maeve preferred the child over him. But in the end he almost threw him back to Maeve and told her to put him in the bedroom out of the bloody road.

Another night he came home to find no dinner ready because, she said, ‘the baby wouldn’t settle’. The resultant punch he gave her was to make sure that that never happened again.

‘You look after me before any squalling brat,’ he yelled, as Maeve wiped the blood oozing from her nose and her split lip. ‘Maybe you’ll remember that in future.’

No longer was Maeve so eager for him each night either, and would often turn from him if Kevin made a murmur, holding the baby in her arms and crooning while her husband grew hot with impatience and frustration. He never spoke of his feelings and fears, but instead grew moodier than ever, and often gave Maeve the odd punch or clout if he felt she was annoying him in some way.

Maeve didn’t really understand what had happened to the husband that she still loved, who’d courted her with such consideration and professed his devotion to her often. She sometimes remembered with a pang of nostalgia how they used to laugh together over something silly, or the hours and hours they used to talk and never tire of one another, or the way she used to yearn for his hands on her body. Now such intimacy seemed to have slunk away from them.

Brendan worked hard, there was no denying that, and in the early days of their marriage he’d talked about his work and the sweltering heat he toiled under, turning copper and zinc into molten metal in white-hot furnaces so that they could be poured into crucibles. The sweat ran from him so freely that often the shirt he wore was still damp when he arrived home.

Maeve had witnessed the weariness on his face when he came in the door and saw the lines on his brow rimed with dirt, and the grime streaking his cheeks. She’d seen his cracked, calloused hands encrusted with black, and smelt the sour sweat of him. She’d often felt sorry for him, and because of it, had forgiven him his temper.

Then she’d always had the kettle on the boil for Brendan’s wash. He said he always felt better with the muck sluiced off him and clean, dry clothes on, but since Kevin’s birth all that had stopped. Now he was prepared to sit down at the table unwashed, reeking from stale sweat and with filthy hands and nails, and would shovel in his food as though he was a pig at a trough.

Because Maeve knew beer inflamed Brendan’s temper, she tried talking to him after his meal when he was more rational and at least sober. She tried, as she’d done before, asking him what she was doing that so enraged him that he felt he had to raise his hand to her. Brendan never had an answer to give her. He felt she needed no explanation and the fact that she seemed to expect one angered him further. His mother would never have questioned his father.

When she tried to talk to him about the money he gave her, which was woefully inadequate, Brendan flew into such a temper Maeve was terrified. She produced a list of things she had to buy, or pay for each week, thinking it might help, and he tore it from her hands, ripped it into pieces and threw them into the fire.

The back of his hand sliced across Maeve’s cheek as he hissed, ‘All the bloody same, women, nag, nag, nag, and always about bloody money. Well, you’ll just have to manage on what I give you, for you’ll get no more.’

Maeve had been stunned by both the blow and Brendan’s reaction. After that she didn’t say anything more to him about the son of whom he seemed to take no notice. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Elsie Phillips next door, who took as much delight in the child as she did herself, Maeve might have become seriously depressed.

It was Elsie’s advice that Maeve sought one sunny morning in September 1932. Elsie listened and then said, ‘You’ll have to tell him, girl. For God’s sake, pregnancy is one thing you can’t hide.’

‘Elsie, I’m scared.’

‘It’s his baby as much as yours, Maeve. You didn’t do it on your own.’

‘You don’t know him, Elsie. He’ll go mad.’

‘Better you tell him than let him find out for himself,’ Elsie said. But she spoke cautiously because she’d known for some time that Maeve’s husband smacked her about a bit. The construction of the houses was not conducive to any degree of privacy, and she’d heard some of the blows Maeve had received, and seen the evidence with her own eyes the next day. But Maeve had not mentioned the violence so neither had Elsie.

Still, Maeve knew Elsie was right. Brendan had to know that she was three months gone with another child. When Maeve told him that night after tea, he flew into a temper and shouted and screamed so much, Elsie was tempted to go in, but Alf told her to mind her own business. She didn’t breathe easy till she heard Maeve’s door slam and knew Brendan had taken himself off to the pub.

All evening Brendan brooded, over the many pints he ordered, on the news he’d received that day. There would be a baby every bloody year, just as he’d imagined it, till Maeve hadn’t a moment to bid him the time of day, and he hadn’t two halfpennies to call his own. Every penny would go to feed and clothe bleeding kids he had never wanted. Some bloody gift from God!

That night Brendan staggered home from the pub consumed with the unfairness of it. It was Maeve’s fault, tempting him like all women tempted men, trapping him into marriage by not letting him do what he wanted until she had the ring on her finger. Bloody bitches, all women. Maeve most of all, and it was about time she was taught a lesson she’d not forget in a hurry.

The next morning, when Brendan saw the mess he’d made of Maeve’s face and hazily remembered what he’d done to her the night before, he felt guilty and ashamed, and angry with himself for feeling that way. He told himself she’d asked for it. He growled at her to get his breakfast and, alarmed and afraid, Maeve, without a word, eased herself painfully from the bed and went to do his bidding.

She was glad when he went to work, for only then did her limbs stop trembling, but when Kevin awoke and began to cry, she groaned as she mounted the stairs, for she was stiff and sore, and every part of her seemed to ache. She wanted to hide from the world, at least until her face was back to normal, she felt so ashamed.

She finished feeding Kevin, changed him and then rocked him in her arms until his eyelids drooped and eventually closed. She laid him in the pram and went into the bedroom, where she painfully dressed herself. Then, wrapping her shawl around her head and shoulders, pulling it well over her face, she made her way to the outdoor lavatory.

Outside the autumn sun penetrated the court in dusty shafts, and small children played around the doorways. Two women stood keeping an eye on them and having a chat and both looked curiously at Maeve. She muttered a greeting, but kept her head down and hurried past.

When she returned the women had gone, though the children still played on, and she was grateful that they took no notice of her. As she reached her door, she heard Kevin’s plaintive cry, and she struggled with the latch, anxious to get in and see to him. She lost her grip on the shawl and it slipped from her just as Elsie Phillips’s door opened. She stared at Maeve’s face with a look of dismay and shock.

So she’d been right, she thought to herself. The brute had been smacking her about, but it was more than the odd slap or punch this time. ‘You poor sod,’ she said with feeling, and the sympathy started the tears in Maeve’s eyes.

She stumbled through the door, the tears almost blinding her. Elsie stood undecided, not sure whether to follow her into the house or go out to the shops, as she’d intended, and mind her own business. But then, she reminded herself, the girl had no one belonging to her, except a sour-faced old cow of an aunt. She’d seen her just the once at Kevin’s christening and couldn’t take to her, nor her milksop, henpecked husband, who seemed to think the sun shone out of Brendan Hogan’s arse.

Her mind made up, she put down her bag, took off her coat, closed her own door and went to Maeve’s. The girl still cried, even as she held the baby, and Elsie’s heart was smitten with pity for her. She knew the pattern Maeve’s life would take from now on, for she believed once a man started beating his wife he would always do so, and she also knew Maeve would not get a lot of sympathy from anyone because of it either.

She took the baby from Maeve and sat him up in the pram, where he could watch what was going on, and pressed his mother down into a chair.

‘I’m going to make us a cup of tea,’ Elsie said, ‘and then see if I can do summat about your face. After that if you need any shopping I’ll get it for you. You’ll not want to go out much for a day or two, I’d say.’

Maeve marvelled that Elsie seemed to know just how she felt and was very glad of the older woman’s presence. For the first time she didn’t feel so isolated.

Elsie had been right. Maeve’s life took on a pattern from that first real beating, the first one that Brendan hadn’t apologised for. She realised whatever she did or didn’t do, however she pleaded, begged or tried to talk to Brendan, he would treat her as he saw fit. In his eyes that was grudgingly giving her money he could spare her after his booze, fags and bets had been accounted for, however inadequate it was, and clouting her whenever he felt like it.

‘Write and tell your mother,’ Elsie advised one day in early spring 1933.

‘Tell her what?’ Maeve demanded harshly, wincing, for she was recovering from another few hefty clouts which she had been given not long after her daughter, Grace, was born on 9 February. ‘Tell her my husband doesn’t give me enough money either to feed us or keep us warm, and beats me? What the hell could she do about it, but worry herself into an early grave?’

A further worry was nagging at Maeve’s mind at this time and that was Brendan’s treatment of Kevin. The child was fifteen months old when his sister was born, no longer a wee baby to be rocked to sleep, but an active toddler.

Maeve knew Brendan had to come first in everything and she’d learnt to accept that. Maeve made dinner for him every night, even if she lived on bread and scrape herself, or sometimes nothing at all, because it was healthier to do so. And while he ate, he wanted the children out of sight, but now Kevin was not always in bed when he came in and that seemed to enrage him, even if the child was doing nothing wrong.

She tried to protect him as much as she was able, but his father often gave him a hefty slap on the legs, or a swipe across the head for no reason that Maeve could see except that he wanted to do it. Remonstrating with him and protesting that Kevin was only a wee boy did no good at all. In fact all she usually got for her efforts was a slap herself. That wouldn’t have stopped her if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was afraid to protest too much in case the child got the brunt of it and she tried to keep them apart as much as possible.

Maeve herself got used to the way life was for her. She lived day to day, interested only in getting enough to eat for herself and Kevin each day. She fed Grace herself and Elsie complained she should be eating wholesome meals to do it properly. Maeve thought that was easy to say. Now she was a regular at the pawnshop, yet the first time she’d gone there she’d nearly died of shame. Ballyglen did not sport a pawnshop or anything like it. Poor people there could apply to the St Vincent de Paul for tokens to spend in the shops for groceries only. You were considered the lowest of the low to apply to them, but often Maeve would have welcomed something to put food in her mouth and her son’s that Brendan could not convert to beer money.

The winter was the hardest, often with no money for either coal or gas, and little enough for food. They would have surely perished but for the odd shovelful of coal from Elsie, or the bit of stew or soup she said she had over. Maeve knew full well she’d done extra on purpose, but was often too hungry and dispirited to care.

‘Elsie, I can see this life stretching out before me for years and years,’ Maeve complained to her friend one day.

Elsie could see it too, but thought it wouldn’t be helpful to say so.

‘I’ve tried talking to him, but it does no good,’ Maeve went on. ‘Surely he can see how we live, what I’m left to eat, and the weans. Dear God, Elsie, if you’d known the type of man he was when we were courting, or even just married . . .’ Maeve shook her head sorrowfully. ‘He’s not the same at all.’

Elsie had heard the story more than once and she still said nothing. She did all she could for Maeve, but to go between man and wife – that was something she shrank from, and her Alf said she was not to get involved. He said Maeve had an uncle she could appeal to, or failing that she could go home to her mother.

But Elsie knew no such course was open to Maeve. On the rare occasions her uncle had braved his wife’s wrath to visit his niece, he always had his kids with him. And her predicament was hardly a subject Maeve could bring up in their hearing. Anyhow, he’d never hear a word said against Brendan and still thought him a fine figure of a man.

As for her mother, Elsie knew she’d been told nothing, for even if she had, as Maeve said, there was little she could do. Maeve wouldn’t leave Brendan unless something desperate happened altogether. She was a good Catholic girl and knew only too well that marriage was for life and you married for better or worse. Anyroad, Elsie thought, even if Maeve wanted to go to her mammy for a wee holiday, a break from the brute, how, when she barely had two halfpennies to bless herself with, would she find the money for the fare?

She didn’t bother saying any of this. Her Alf was a good man, and a good provider. He’d never lifted his hand to her all their married life, and she knew if things had been different he would have been a good father to their children. Well, that was not to be and Elsie had faced that fact years before, but she often wondered what she would have done had Maeve been her daughter.

Would she have stood by just because of some words said at an altar and watched Maeve and her children being terrorised or half starved and frozen to death? No, by God, she wouldn’t, and as Maeve hadn’t her mother and father to stand up for her Elsie was determined to do all she could.

Maeve knew she couldn’t have coped so well if it hadn’t been for Elsie. Getting the children clothes and even some for herself had been a real headache. All the baby necessities had been bought from Maeve’s wages when she worked at the café, but as the children grew problems arose. Elsie took her to jumble sales where for a few hoarded pennies she could buy jumpers and cardigans to be unravelled and knitted up again, or skirts that could be cut up to make something for the children, and then sometimes Elsie would bring a similar load from the rag market.

Maeve had been taught to sew and her mother had a treadle sewing machine similar to Elsie’s, so Maeve knew all about cutting out and tacking together for Elsie to go over seams and hemming neatly. Knitting she’d never been shown, but she soon picked it up. ‘Born of necessity,’ Maeve said when Elsie commented on the speed Maeve was able to knit after just a couple of weeks. ‘Anyway, it gives me pleasure to have the children dressed respectable. I only wish I could knit shoes like the booties they had as babies.’

Shoes were the very devil to get. There were adult shoes sometimes, and Maeve had got herself a pair at a jumble sale when her others had literally fallen off her feet, though the second-hand ones were a size too big. Any children’s shoes were, in the main, worn through, the toes kicked in or the soles hanging off.