Pack Up Your Troubles

But opportunity wasn’t a thing that Maeve had in abundance. For two weeks she lay in hospital while Elsie cared for her children, trying to think of some way out of the dilemma she was in. Elsie had had to keep Kevin away from school for the first week while his back healed, though she thought he might carry the marks for ever. Grace had been sworn to secrecy lest the children be taken away. The doctor had wanted to inform the authorities, but Maeve had begged him not to. She was terrified her children would be taken from her and then she knew she’d have the devil’s own job to get them back, and so reluctantly Dr Fleming agreed to say nothing. Brendan, however, was forced to return to his mother’s house, for Elsie refused even to boil a kettle for the man she called a drunken bully.

For the fortnight, Maeve plotted and planned, but all her thoughts came to nothing, for she lacked that basic commodity – money. She came out of hospital at the end of June quite desperate and yet no nearer to achieving her objective.

‘You can’t stay with the man,’ Elsie stormed.

‘I can’t leave him either,’ Maeve cried back. ‘Where in heaven’s name would I go with two children and no job?’

There was only one place, Maeve knew it and Elsie knew it. That was to go across the water to her mother’s. ‘Surely to God, Maeve, when you tell her how things are, she won’t refuse to take you in?’

‘No,’ Maeve said. ‘She’d support me if she only knew the half of it.’

‘Well then?’

‘Well then nothing, Elsie. How the hell am I to find the money to take us all to Ireland? You know I haven’t money to bless myself with.’

‘Could you ask your mammy?’

‘I could not,’ Maeve cried. ‘Don’t ever think of such a thing. She has six others besides myself, and the youngest still at school.’

And there the matter rested.

But a couple of weeks later, it reared its ugly head again. In the first week of Maeve’s release from hospital the doctor had told Brendan quite forcibly that he had to leave Maeve alone and for a good while, and even the priest, Father Trelawney, alerted by the doctor as to Maeve’s delicate state of health, told him he must curb his natural desires and show patience.

He showed patience, though his temper was surly and he lashed out at Maeve often, but she could cope with that. It wasn’t in the nature of an actual beating. But by the third week of July, three weeks after she’d been released from hospital, Brendan reckoned Maeve had had enough time to get over whatever it was had ailed her, and he began again demanding his rights. Maeve lay passive beneath him and prayed she wouldn’t become pregnant again, but she was afraid of inflaming his temper further by refusing.

About this time, Elsie came in one day in a fever of excitement. The two children were out playing when she burst in. ‘I’ve got a job for you,’ Elsie said.

‘What?’ Maeve looked at her in astonishment.

‘You heard. A job,’ Elsie repeated. ‘I’ve just been in Mountford’s and the old man has had a heart attack. It wasn’t serious, like – it was in the way of a warning – but the doctor said he had to take life easier for a bit and Mrs Mountford asked me if I would work a few hours to help her out for a bit, or if I knew of someone trustworthy. I thought of you straight off, for this way you can earn enough to take you to see your mother in Ireland.’

‘Elsie, I couldn’t,’ Maeve said. ‘Brendan would never—’

‘You don’t tell Brendan,’ Elsie told her firmly. ‘And you certainly don’t bloody well ask him.’

‘But he’d know,’ Maeve insisted, thinking how close and how public Mountford’s corner shop was.

‘How would he?’ Elsie demanded. ‘Mrs Mountford told me the hours. Ten to four, Monday to Friday except for Wednesday, when the shop closes at one o’clock, and nine till two on Saturday. You’d manage that, and still be home to cook the sod his tea.’

Maeve knew she would. Brendan left the house at half-past six in the morning and didn’t come home till half-six in the evening – that was when he came straight home. On Saturdays he finished work at one and went on to the pub and didn’t come home till at least half-past three. But still she hesitated. ‘I couldn’t, Elsie.’

‘Why not? You just tell old George Mountford and his missus, Edith, that you have experience. They’ll snap you up.’

‘What about the weans?’

‘What about them?’ Elsie had said. ‘You can take them to school in the mornings and I’ll collect and mind them in the afternoons till you come in. Saturdays, you leave them in with me.’

‘Ah, Elsie . . .’ Maeve said. She knew she had a great deal to be grateful for in the older woman and to prevent her getting all tearful about it, asked in a jocular way, ‘Are you dying to get rid of me so much?’

‘Aye. You’ve guessed,’ Elsie said, but her eyes were moist and she hoped Maeve wouldn’t notice, and to prevent her doing just that she said sternly, ‘Get yourself down that shop before I put my bloody boot behind you. I’ll put the kettle on and we’ll have a cup of tea to celebrate your new job when you get back.’

‘Don’t count your chickens,’ Maeve said as she went out the door.

‘You’ll get it,’ Elsie said to her retreating back.

‘Sweet Jesus, let her get this job,’ she whispered. Jobs were hard to come by and if Maeve didn’t get this, there could be a long wait for another and anything might have happened to her by then. Elsie knelt down on the rag rug in front of the firegrate and said a decade of rosary for her and hoped no one would take it in their head to pop in and see her kneeling to pray in the middle of the morning.

Maeve loved working for George and Edith Mountford, and as the months passed, she realised she’d seldom been so happy. Around her people were talking about the war that everyone now knew was imminent, and yet she was feeling very content. Her life was even easier once Kevin passed his seventh birthday in November and took himself and Grace to school and back every day.

The children were looking marginally better than they had. Maeve bought a few nice things for them to eat and some new clothes they desperately needed, though most of her wages were stored in the tin cash box in Elsie’s house, to buy the tickets that were to be her and her children’s passport to freedom. As part of Maeve’s wages, Edith always made up a basket for her on Saturday afternoon and Maeve was surprised by the Mountfords’ generosity. She’d had to hide a lot of the produce in the wardrobe in the attic, only bringing out a few things at a time to stack on the shelves. It would never do to arouse Brendan’s suspicions.

It surprised Maeve as time went on that no one let on to him that she worked in the corner shop, for everyone knew. She served neighbours in the shop every day and yet no one said a word about it to Brendan.

‘Why would they tell your old man?’ Elsie asked when she queried it. ‘Most of the women don’t like him. They know he keeps you short of money and knocks you about. They think you’ve got guts to put up with it and earn some money to provide for your kids. They won’t split on you.’

And they didn’t. And Maeve coped, although for the first week or two she found it tiring being on her feet all day and then dealing with the children and cooking a meal when she got home. But she watched the money rise in the cash box and it cheered her. The cash box had been her first purchase and she knew there was no place to hide money in her house. If Brendan even got a sniff there was any to be had, he’d tear the place apart until he found it and have it off her. It had to be left in Elsie’s keeping, but Elsie had suggested the cash box with a key, which Maeve must keep.

Maeve had been working at the shop just over a fortnight when Brendan gave her such a beating one night that she was bruised from head to toe the next day. Every movement hurt, but she forced her stiffened limbs into action, for she wasn’t missing a day from her job.

Edith Mountford looked at her bruised face and the left eye nearly closed and asked, ‘What happened to you?’

‘I walked into a door,’ Maeve said.

‘Some bloody door,’ Edith remarked. ‘Stick to that story if you want, but both you and I know what manner of door it was. You poor sod.’

The sympathy in her voice brought tears springing to Maeve’s eyes, but she brushed them away and Edith said, ‘You’d best work in the back for a couple of days till your face settles down a bit. You don’t want folks gaping at you.’

Maeve was grateful for the older woman’s understanding and she spent the next two days bagging up the flour, tea, sugar, currants and raisins, and doing the accounts and ordering new supplies, the tasks that Edith usually did. By the third day the bruising was more yellow than blue, but Maeve bought cosmetics in the chemist’s that she hoped hid much of that, and the puffiness around her eye, and went back into the shop.

Many asked where she’d been, or looked at her rather curiously, but none asked outright what had happened to her face. Edith thought they didn’t have to ask, for despite the repair job Maeve had attempted, most of her customers would know she’d had a good hiding. And it was a beating and a half. Edith had seen the bruises covering Maeve’s arms when she’d pushed up the sleeves of her overall when she’d been bagging up in the back.

Maeve knew too, and decided in future she’d have to try to protect her face in some way. Edith, kind as she was, couldn’t keep her on if she was unfit to serve in the shop.

These thoughts came to her mind the next time Brendan started on her, one night about three weeks later. ‘Get up, you lazy sod, and get me a drink,’ he growled.

Maeve sighed but that was enough.

‘I said get up.’ His hand reached for her and she felt the flimsy slip she slept in rip down the middle.

She saw his fist and ducked as she screamed at him, ‘Leave me alone!’

Heedless even of the sleeping children in the attic, intent only on protecting herself, she stopped him for an instant with her cry, and she saw the cruel sardonic smile on his mouth. She knew it was useless to try to fight and so she tried threats.

Twisting from his grasp, she left a piece of her slip in his hands and she rolled off the other side of the bed and stood facing him. ‘You touch me, Brendan, and I’ll shout it from the rooftops,’ she yelled at him. ‘And I’ll go down in the morning to St Catherine’s and tell the priest. Do you confess it, I wonder, the times you beat me?’

‘You’re my wife, you stupid cow. I have the right to chastise you.’

‘What right?’ Maeve demanded. ‘And your family? Do they know what manner of man you are?’

But even as she spoke, she thought they probably did. Brendan’s four brothers treated their wives shamefully. Maeve wasn’t sure if they knocked them about, but the women were kept as short of money as she was, and she’d seen Brendan’s mother, Lily, with a split lip on one occasion and a black eye on another. In a household like that, she doubted they’d turn a hair if she complained to them about Brendan.

‘Or I could tell my Uncle Michael,’ she said. ‘He’d sort you out if he knew the half of it.’ But she knew that her uncle would do nothing, even if he believed her.

‘You stupid bitch!’ Brendan cried, and he leapt over the bed and gave Maeve such a punch that she was knocked off her feet. But she was up again quickly – she had no desire to be kicked senseless – and she tried to protect her face as the blows rained down on her.

Eventually Brendan stopped laying into her and pulled her hands from her face. She smelt the sour, beery stink of him as he yelled at her, ‘Now do as you’re bloody well told and get me a sodding drink.’

Maeve was glad to go, glad to get away from the man, but as she filled the kettle, she prayed she had enough gas to boil it and still have some for the morning.

But when she returned to the bedroom with the mug of tea in her hand, it was to see that Brendan had fallen on to the bed and now lay flat on top of the covers still in his clothes. His eyes were shut and snores were emanating from his open mouth. Maeve sighed in grateful relief and eased herself into the bed beside him, taking great care not to waken him.

After that night, he left her alone for a while. However, Maeve knew the situation wouldn’t last. Brendan was essentially a bully, and a bully he’d remain. So when in the middle of March 1939 she missed a period, she knew the time had come to leave.

First though, Maeve took the children down to the rag market in the Bull Ring and bought them new clothes, for she’d not take them home to her mother in tatters. The clothes she’d bought them when she first started at Mountford’s had been decent underwear to replace the ragged pieces they had, but these new things had to be hidden at Elsie’s to allay Brendan’s suspicions. She also bought them their first sandals and a little grey haversack each to carry their own clothes in.

Even after her purchases there were over twelve pounds in the tin. The train from New Street would cost a guinea altogether for the two children and one pound one and sixpence for Maeve, and the ferry would cost her fifty shillings and half of that amount each for Kevin and Grace.

‘It will be over seven pounds,’ Elsie said. ‘It’s a powerful amount of money.’

Maeve knew it was and she had yet to price the rail bus – the last leg of her journey home. But whatever it cost, she would pay it. She’d go home and raise her children – including the child as yet unborn – in dignity and free from fear.

It was hard saying goodbye to the Mountfords, but harder still saying goodbye to Elsie.

‘He’ll come round here, you know,’ Maeve said. ‘It’ll be the first place he’ll make for.’

‘I’ll just act dumb; it won’t be hard for me to do,’ and Elsie gave a wry smile.

‘He’ll know where I’ve gone,’ Maeve said. ‘God, he knows I have nowhere else.’

‘Will you tell your uncle?’

‘Not before I leave. He sees no harm in Brendan. Not that I’ve told him anything, because his wife, Agnes, is not the understanding type and I didn’t want to be running to him with my problems. If I was to tell him now, he’d probably think we’d just had a wee bit of a row and it only needed him to come and have a wee chat with us both and everything would be all right again.’

‘He’d do that?’ Elsie cried. ‘He’d tell him – even if you asked him not to?’

‘He might,’ Maeve said. ‘He might feel it was his duty. Anyway, I’m not going to risk it.’

And she told no one else either. Barely had the door closed behind Brendan the next morning, before she pulled the case from off the top of the wardrobe and began piling her clothes in it.

She shook the children awake. She hadn’t dared whisper a word of their escape before in case the children let something slip. Kevin was cranky because he was tired and Grace was still sleepy. But when Maeve told them where they were going, all thoughts of sleep sped from them. She said they were going on a train and a big ship over the water to Ireland to see their other gran, Granny Brannigan.

Then she gave them the haversacks and told them to put all their clothes in them. She then put out some of the new clothes that they hadn’t been able to wear yet, the ones she’d kept hidden at Elsie’s.

When they were ready to go, Maeve told them of the bag she’d filled for them with nice things to eat. There were sandwiches of jam, cheese and ham, with sausages and hard-boiled eggs that she’d cooked the night before to eat cold, and a swiss roll for afterwards. She had made two bottles of tea for herself, accepted a bottle of dandelion-and-burdock pop for the children from the Mountfords and packed a couple of old cups without handles to drink from.

‘When can we start on the picnic?’ Kevin had said, his mouth watering at the thought of it.

‘We can have some of the sandwiches on the train,’ Maeve had told him. ‘But not all of them, and no cake and only a little bit of pop.’

‘Oh, Mammy.’

‘It’s no good going on like that,’ Maeve had said sharply. ‘The food has got to last us a long time. It will take us all day to get home.’

Home! Just to say the word lifted her spirits, and she pushed her small son through the door, laughing gently at his disgruntled face.

There was no one about but Elsie to bid the family farewell. It was that hour in the morning when few women would be around; those husbands still in work would have left and the women would be busy organising their families for the day, and Maeve was glad of it.

She and Elsie clung to one another, though they weren’t in the habit of it, and when they drew apart there were tears in both women’s eyes.

‘Write to me?’ Elsie urged, and as Maeve nodded she asked, ‘You have let your family know you’re coming?’

‘Aye,’ Maeve said, but she didn’t say she’d left sending the letter till the day before. It would arrive that morning and it would be too late for her mother to tell her not to come. She didn’t expect a rapturous welcome in the farmhouse in Donegal, for her mother would never countenance a woman leaving her husband. She’d said a novena to the Blessed Virgin that she’d be able to convince her mother that she had a justifiable cause for walking out on Brendan Hogan. Anyway, that was it! She’d burnt her boats now right enough.

She straightened her shoulders, hoisted up her case, bid Elsie goodbye and walked down the street with a child each side of her.

FIVE

The children loved the train, as Maeve knew they would, and they ate their jam sandwiches, washed down with the pop from the cracked cups, almost as soon as they were settled. They were enchanted by the countryside they passed through. Now and again cows stared nervously at them over farm gates and sheep on the hillsides tugged on the grass relentlessly. Maeve told them the names of the animals and of the crops growing that they’d never seen before.

By the time the train reached Liverpool, both children were beginning to tire, but the excitement of going on a ship buoyed them up and the sight of it didn’t disappoint them. ‘Ulster Prince,’ Kevin said, reading out the name on the side. ‘Isn’t this grand?’ And it was grand, though the day had got duller as they travelled north, and rain began to fall as they went on to the gangplank. Maeve hoped it would stop raining soon so that the children could explore the ship without getting soaked. She peered over the rail and looked at the water lapping backwards and forwards as the vessel shifted slightly. It looked grey and scummy, not unlike the water that was left in the copper in the brew house after she’d done the washing.

The ship’s hooter sounded, making the children jump, and Kevin watched the frenzied activities on the dockside. ‘They’re pulling up the gangplank,’ he cried, ‘and loosening those thick ropes.’

Maeve lifted Grace to look over the rail and the three of them watched the ferry pull away from the shores of England and from Brendan Hogan with relief.

The ferry had gone no distance at all and Liverpool was still a blur on the horizon when Grace began to feel sick. Kevin left his nauseous sister, tended by his mother, who was, he decided, a most peculiar colour herself, and went off to explore the ship.

He was back in just a few minutes. ‘Mammy, there’s a café here,’ he cried, ‘like a proper one with pink curtains at the windows and they’re selling breakfast. Porridge, toast and jam and a pot of tea for one and six.’ He’d watched some of the people eating and his mouth had watered.

Maeve badly wanted to dip into the store of money and give him one and six. It was cheap enough, for Grace was in no state to eat and she herself was trying to ignore the churning of her stomach to deal with her daughter. But, she didn’t know how long the money would have to last them.

Regretfully Maeve shook her head. ‘I have to watch the pennies.’ Kevin didn’t argue – hadn’t it been the same all the days of his life? – but Maeve saw the disappointment in his eyes. She knew he was hungry. They’d not had much to eat on the train and to make it up to him she gave him a few sandwiches, a couple of cold sausages and a slice of cake. After it, Kevin ran around every bit of the ship that he was allowed in, along with other young boys as eager as he was to see all there was to see.

Maeve and Grace didn’t share Kevin’s enthusiasm and were glad to get off the heaving rolling ship and on to dry land once more, where Maeve shared out the rest of the food. Grace was very tired from all the travelling and once she’d eaten a little, she laid her head on her mother’s knee and went fast asleep. Even Kevin allowed his eyelids to droop. He was becoming calmer the further they went from the house, and even Maeve was more relaxed.

‘Lean against me, Kevin, if you’re tired,’ she said.

‘Aren’t you tired too?’ Kevin asked her.

‘No,’ said Maeve. ‘I’m too excited to sleep.’

She was apprehensive too, though she didn’t share that with Kevin, but whatever reception she found at her journey’s end, she knew it would be better than the life she’d left behind. Kevin was reassured and allowed himself to sleep, and so deep was his sleep that Maeve had to shake him awake when they got to Portadown.

The conductor on the rail bus they boarded for the last leg of their journey recognised Maeve. ‘Well, hello there, Maeve Brannigan.’

‘Hogan now,’ Maeve corrected him.

‘And these are your two?’ he said, smiling at the children. ‘Home for a wee holiday, are you all?’

‘We are that,’ Maeve said firmly, before either child was able to say anything else. ‘And glad of it.’

‘And I would be if I lived in Birmingham,’ the conductor said, and added to Maeve, ‘I bet your mammy will be pleased to see you. It’s strange that she didn’t mention you coming.’

‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,’ Maeve explained, and hoped her mammy would indeed be pleased.

In the dim evening light she could just see the green Donegal hills flecked with sheep, and dotted here and there with little thatched cottages that had plumes of smoke rising in the air. She closed her eyes in relief and happiness. She was nearly home. She pointed out the familiar things to the children and they listened eagerly as she described her parents’ farm to them as the rail bus ate up the miles.

‘Here we are, then,’ the conductor said suddenly.

Grace and Kevin looked about them as they alighted. ‘We can’t be here,’ Kevin said, ‘because it isn’t anywhere.’

Maeve didn’t answer him straight away and instead pulled their luggage from the rail bus to lie at a heap at their feet. She’d helped the children on with their haversacks and picked up the case before she said, ‘This isn’t a proper station like those we passed; really it’s not a stop at all, just the place nearest to the farm. We go through the gate and we’re nearly there,’ and so saying she opened the five-barred gate.

Maeve saw the children looking about them, and led them up the path that ran between two hedges bordering fields on either side. Dusk had fallen and suddenly Maeve felt the children’s hands tighten in her own.

‘Why isn’t anyone here to meet us?’ Grace asked, and Maeve could see Kevin’s puzzled eyes on her too.

Maeve also wondered that. What if they wouldn’t even see her? She told herself firmly to stop frightening the life out of herself and said as confidently as she could, ‘I expect they’re all busy, and anyway, it’s only a step away now.’ And then she laughed at the children’s fright when two cows put their heads over the hedge and lowed at them.

They came to the corner of the cottage and as they turned into the cobbled yard in front of it there was a sudden terrific noise from a building beside the barn, but Maeve told her bemused children it was just the hens locked up for the night disturbed by their footsteps on the cobbles. The words had barely left her mouth when the farmhouse door suddenly opened and two dogs leapt out of it and around them, snapping and barking. Grace screamed and held tightly to her mother.

‘Skip, Laddie,’ said a stern voice from the doorway, and Maeve turned to look at the young man framed in the doorway.