Pack Up Your Troubles

‘Colin?’ she said in wonder and surprise. ‘Little Colin?’

‘Not so little now,’ Colin replied. ‘I’m sixteen.’

She’d known he was sixteen, for hadn’t her mother written with news of the family? But in her mind Colin was still the wee boy of seven she’d left behind nine years before.

‘You’d better come in,’ Colin said.

Later the children told Maeve how pretty they thought the house was. It was low and painted white, with little windows all along the side of it and thatched with yellow straw, and grey smoke escaped from the squat chimney. The door was in two halves so you could open the top or the bottom. Both now stood open and Maeve led the children inside.

She had her heart in her mouth as she entered the dim farmhouse. It was just as if she’d never left. There was the press opposite the door containing all the crockery and a food cupboard to the side of it. Two pails of water stood on stools by the side of the bedroom door, while to the other side was the huge kitchen table before one of the windows with wooden chairs arranged around it. The settle and the armchairs were pulled up before the peat fire, and the curtained-off bed that belonged to Maeve’s parents was in the far corner.

The only difference was in the group waiting for her. There was no Tom, for he’d been married two years before, and no Liam, away in Dublin, and Kate too was living there, in the nurses’ home. Rosemarie was there, but Maeve knew she was engaged to be married, yet she’d been just twelve when Maeve had left home. Colin was still at home, and Nuala, no longer the wee child of just four striking out for independence, but almost a young lady of thirteen.

Her parents hadn’t changed. There might have been a few more grey hairs in her mother’s head, and more lines on her face and on that of her father, but they’d altered so little compared to the children. And across the room, in the silence that screamed around her, she saw them all staring at her.

Annie Brannigan waited for her daughter to speak, to explain to them why she’d done the disgraceful thing of leaving her husband and coming back home with her children.

Grace and Kevin were weary despite the snatches of sleep they’d had, and both were bone tired of getting on and off trams, trains, ships and rail buses. And now they were here in their mammy’s old home and no one seemed to welcome them at all. Maeve saw the wobbling chin of her daughter and the obstinate scowl of her son, and she licked her lips nervously and said in a voice little more than a whisper, ‘Hello, Mammy, Daddy.’

‘Hello! Is that all you can say after nine years and you descending on us like this, and the only notice a scribe of a letter that arrived this morning telling us so?’ Annie asked her daughter angrily.

‘I’m sorry,’ Maeve said. ‘I had to come. There were reasons.’

She saw Grace’s face pucker and the tears that had been threatening since she’d entered the farmhouse spilt down her cheeks. She sank to the flagged kitchen floor with a loud sob, crying, ‘I don’t like it here.’

The sight of the child crying smote Annie’s heart. Whatever was wrong it wasn’t the children’s fault, and she went forward and gathered Grace into her arms. ‘And you’re Kevin, I suppose?’ she said to the boy, who was scowling at her, and without waiting for him to answer went on, ‘Take that look off your face, boy, and come away to the fire. If I know weans, a little food won’t come amiss and will put a new complexion on the matter altogether.’

After that, it wasn’t so bad at all. No one spoke of their unexpected arrival in front of the children. Instead Annie began to prepare a meal for them while Rosemarie and Nuala laid the table and Colin carried the cases and haversacks into the bedrooms.

Maeve saw the children were fascinated by the peat fire that everything was cooked on, the frying pan with the sizzling ham and eggs at the side of it, and the potatoes in a large pot fastened to a hook on a black metal bar that swung out from the wall.

The smell tantalised them all, and Maeve and the children were glad enough to scramble up to the table to eat the fine meal. It was served with butter yellower than the children had ever seen – not that they’d seen much butter at all in their young lives – and slices of bread that Maeve explained was soda bread.

Maeve was grateful to her father for keeping the conversation going around the table that first night. He didn’t touch on the reasons for their being there, but instead asked the children questions about their school and friends, and told little stories and anecdotes of his own to put them at their ease. Maeve saw the children start to relax and open up to the kind man she’d always found her father to be. She saw his eyes light on her often and felt comforted, for she knew her father would be understanding and sympathetic when he knew the reason for her flight home.

Much later that night, Maeve sat and talked to her mother. They were alone. The children and young ones, Colin and Nuala, had all gone to bed, and Rosemarie had gone out with her young man, and her father was taking his last walk round the farm with the two dogs, as he was wont to do, checking on the beasts. Maeve had waited until she’d got her mother to herself before she began to explain, and once they were seated before the fire with a cup of tea apiece she began, ‘I’m sorry to land on you like this, Mammy, but really I had to come. Brendan is . . . isn’t the man I thought he was. I mean not like the man I married.’

‘Then he’s like many a one, cutie dear,’Annie said. ‘How has he changed?’

‘Well, Brendan earns good money, but I see little of it,’ Maeve burst out. ‘Sometimes I have barely enough to feed us. The weans go to bed hungry often. If it weren’t for Elsie next door—’

‘God, girl!’ Annie exclaimed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re telling your business to the neighbours?’

‘Mammy, the neighbours would know even if I didn’t say a word,’ Maeve explained. ‘It’s not like here. We live on top of one another. The whole street, the whole neighbourhood, knows your business. But Elsie’s not like that, anyway. She’s a friend and she helps me. God, there’s times I don’t know where I’d have been without her.’

‘Where is your husband in all this?’ Annie asked her daughter, tight-lipped.

‘My husband? Did you say my husband?’ Maeve asked crisply. ‘My husband, Mammy, is down at the pub every night, not caring if we go cold and hungry, as long as he has his beer money. Then, when he has his belly full, he comes home and takes it out on me, or wee Kevin.’

‘He hits you?’ Annie cried, at last incensed on her daughter’s behalf.

‘Aye, sometimes he just hits me. I can cope with that. It’s when he really lays into me so my body is bruised everywhere and my face a swollen mess, with my eyes blackened and my lips split, that’s what I find hard to bear.’

Annie’s mouth had dropped open in shock as Maeve spoke, and when she’d finished she still stared at her, while her lips formed words, but no sound came out.

‘I’m sorry, Mammy, for blurting it out like that,’ Maeve said. ‘But it’s how it is often when he has the drink in him. But other times he can be sober, or nearly sober, and yet he takes his belt off to Kevin.’

‘No!’ Annie cried. The rearing of her children had in the main been left to her, although there had been occasions when Thomas had sometimes seen fit to discipline his sons for some serious misdemeanour. He’d used nothing but the flat of his hand across their backsides and they’d grown up with respect for him because of it. But a belt on a wee boy . . .!

‘You’ll see the marks yet across his back,’ Maeve said. ‘Brendan’s been at him since the child was three years old. I get in between them and then I catch it. I think,’ Maeve went on, ‘he resents the weans and especially Kevin. Every time I tell him I’m pregnant, I know I’m for it.’

‘Oh, Maeve, why didn’t you tell us sooner?’

‘After I’d made such a fuss to marry Brendan, I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake and I didn’t want to worry you. What in God’s name could you do?’

‘What about your Uncle Michael?’ Annie asked. ‘My heart was easier about you because he was there.’

‘Well, he’s not so near really,’ Maeve said. ‘It’s not like Ballyglen in Birmingham, you know, where everyone in the town is just a stop away from one another. It’s a tidy walk, but I do go and see him now and again. But his wife, Agnes, isn’t so terribly welcoming.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Mammy, Michael hasn’t got the fine house he’d have us believe. It’s just a back-to-back like my own, though it’s better furnished. Also, he has a job and a good one, but before this talk of war he was put on short time – three days a week, and some weeks only two. They were suffering themselves and very glad of the money and food you sent.’

Annie could scarcely believe what she was hearing. All the time Maeve had been in England, she’d comforted herself with the fact that she was being looked after by her uncle, who had a good job, a sizeable house and plenty of money to help his niece should she fall on hard times. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’

Maeve shrugged. ‘It was Michael’s tale to tell,’ she said. ‘Anyway, even if Uncle Michael had been better off it would hardly have mattered.’ Maeve hated bad-mouthing Michael to her mother, the baby brother she had always loved, but she felt Annie had to know how it was.

‘It would be no good complaining to him about Brendan. He likes him, Mammy. Brendan is a man’s man. When Michael told you he was a fine figure of a man, he told the truth as he saw it. He still feels that. And, even if he should want to help, Aunt Agnes wouldn’t let him, for he does what she wants him to.’

‘Does Agnes not like him helping his family?’

‘No, she doesn’t,’ Maeve said. ‘Her family live all around her and she sees them all the time, but she didn’t want Uncle Michael’s coming over from Ireland and making demands on him.’

‘Is he still on this short-time work?’

‘No,’ Maeve said. ‘Everyone’s fully employed now, with war looming. Uncle Michael’s even got overtime, more than he needs, really, in the foundry. His children, Jane and Billy, are both working too, both in munitions factories. There’s plenty of work for everyone now and plenty of money. Even Aunt Agnes is thinking of getting a job.’

‘Aunt Agnes?’

‘It’s not so shocking over there, Mammy, to see women working,’ Maeve told her mother. ‘Agnes says they’ll need the women if the men get called up, as they’re sure to like they did in the last war. I got a job in a shop and that’s how I scraped the money up to come here, and kit the weans out with decent things.’

‘I wondered how you managed it,’ Annie said. ‘I mean, with Brendan keeping you so short I know you couldn’t have saved it out of the housekeeping.’

‘God, no. It’s bad enough to try and find the money to keep body and soul alive on what he hands over, and he would have it back off me if I didn’t take it to the shops that very day. Mind, all it does is pay off the tick, for the things I’ve had in the week.’

Annie shook her head to think of her daughter suffering this way when they had plenty to eat for every meal. ‘And not a word about a job in your letters?’

‘I couldn’t risk telling you, and you letting Michael know, and have him say something to Brendan.’

‘Surely the neighbours knew?’ Annie said. ‘You said they knew everyone’s business.’

‘Oh yes, they knew,’ Maeve said. ‘At least the women did. I served them. But they knew the life I was leading. They knew the way the weans lived and knew they got little enough to eat. The women probably thought good luck to me if I managed to earn something to feed them properly. Anyway, whatever they thought, no one whispered a word of it.’

‘And what made you decide to come home in the end?’ Annie said.

Maeve was quiet for a moment and then she said, ‘At first, at the very beginning, I used to get the feeling that somehow I deserved what was happening to me. That I must have done something wrong, or Brendan wouldn’t have been so angry with me. I never felt that way, though, when he was hitting Kevin. Then I just felt angry, but for myself . . . Elsie said I was a fool, and that he’d kill me in the end, but I was so scared of him by then, I couldn’t think straight.’

‘Oh, my dear girl.’

Maeve hadn’t been aware she was crying until her mother spoke. She scrubbed at her eyes impatiently and went on, ‘It’s all right, Mammy. I’m fine now. Let me tell you everything before Daddy is back, and you can then let him know what you see fit. You see, it was the first miscarriage when I realised I truly hated and despised the man I’d once loved so much. I felt sad about it too; it felt like a failure. I’d imagined Brendan and I would have such a rosy future ahead of us.

‘Before we married and even in the first few months while we lived above the café and before I fell pregnant with Kevin, we were happy. So when he lashed out at me at first, I felt that in some way I deserved it. It seems crazy now, Mammy, but I hadn’t realised anyone could change so much. And then he was always so sorry in the beginning. He always begged me to forgive him and promised it wouldn’t happen again. It was when I became pregnant with Grace that I had the first bad beating from him and after that, he never bothered to apologise any more.’

She looked up at her mother and saw that her mother’s eyes were brimming with tears. ‘You must think I was stupid, Mammy.’

‘God love you, not at all, at all,’ Annie told Maeve, her voice husky with emotion and she clasped one of her daughter’s hands in her own and held it tight. ‘Go on, pet.’

Maeve sighed. ‘After that, Mammy, I knew I’d married a bully and that was going to be the pattern of my life from then on, and fear had sort of taken over from love. But God, Mammy, when I lost the first baby – you mind, I wrote and told you about the two miscarriages early on?’

‘Aye. I was heartsore for you, so I was.’

‘Mammy, I lost those babies after a good hiding from Brendan,’ Maeve said. ‘I wasn’t eating properly either because there was so little food in the house. The first time he hadn’t known I was pregnant and I lay in bed, knowing there was no longer a baby growing inside me and I felt useless. I could do nothing about my own life and couldn’t even protect my unborn child. I not only feared Brendan, but I also realised I hated him.

‘Then I lost another at three months, in much the same way as the first, but this time Brendan knew I was pregnant and concentrated his attack on my stomach and seemed almost satisfied when I miscarried. The last one I lost because of a vicious kick in the stomach that I got from trying to protect Kevin. Then, with me out of action, because he’d nearly knocked me senseless – I still have the scars from the hobnails on my stomach – he really took it out of the child. He beat him black and blue. I think he might have beaten him to death that night if Elsie hadn’t come in. She got the doctor in and he sent for an ambulance for me.’

‘God, child, this is terrible,’ Annie said, greatly distressed. ‘And for you to tell not a soul . . .’

‘I was ashamed,’ Maeve said. ‘I don’t know what of, either. It wasn’t me should have been ashamed. When the doctors asked me about the boot-shaped bruise on my stomach, I told them I’d fallen over the fireguard. They didn’t believe me, but I stuck to my story. Then, when I missed my period again this month, I knew I had to get away. Can we stay, Mammy, till I get myself sorted out?’

Maeve saw her mother was moved by what she’d told her, but she also knew her mother didn’t really want her there. You married for better or worse, richer or poorer, and that was how some would see it, regardless of what the woman had to endure. Her mother wouldn’t turn her away, Maeve knew that, but in the same circumstances many would, and would tell Annie so. By receiving her daughter, Maeve knew Annie would lose face in the small community and that mattered to her.

But Maeve knew she mattered more. She’d always been assured of her mother’s love and support, and she knew she’d not turn her back on her or the children.

And Annie could not, after all she’d heard, refuse them a place of refuge. She’d seen the lines of suffering on her daughter’s white, gaunt face, and had been shocked by the sight of her grandchildren, pitifully thin and pasty-faced, and knew whatever it cost, they were welcome in her home.

She held out her arms and cradled Maeve as she hadn’t done since she was a child. ‘Why, child, of course you can stay here and for as long as you like,’ she said. ‘Where else would you come but home? And as for your father and the others, leave them to me. I’ll tell them what I think fit.’

Tears of gratitude ran down Maeve’s cheeks and she held her mother tight. Years later she could still remember the comfort her mother’s arms and words had been.

SIX

It was just as her mother said it would be. The family all accepted her. Only her father spoke of it. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Maeve,’ he said, ‘but you’re home now and you’re safe.’

‘Thanks, Daddy,’ Maeve said, and her eyes filled with tears at his words. She wondered that she hadn’t come home sooner, but then she hadn’t the wherewithal before, that was why. But her conscience troubled her because she had two children with her and was expecting another. She couldn’t expect her parents to keep them and she decided she’d look round for a job to provide for them herself.

But when she spoke to her mother about it Annie had been adamant that if Maeve was determined to look for a job then she wasn’t to do so until after the baby was born. ‘You’re not fit for anything, the state you’re in,’ she said. ‘You’re skin and bone. You need feeding up and making healthy.’

Her father said more: ‘I’ll not have a pregnant daughter of mine go out to work, as if I hadn’t the means to keep her. When I need help to feed and clothe my own flesh and blood I’ll let you know.’

Maeve didn’t pursue the issue. The shock of what she’d done had got to her anyway, and she was worn out with it all. A peculiar lassitude seemed to affect her those first few days at the cottage as she was expected to do so little.

Elsie’s letter jolted her back into life and reminded her that Brendan was only half a day’s journey away. Elsie told Maeve that Brendan had been round to her house the first evening, as they’d thought he would, demanding to know where his wife and children were, but Elsie said she’d acted dumb and said she had no idea.

He didn’t believe me, of course, and if Alf hadn’t been by my side I wouldn’t have fancied my chances with him. He was that mad, he was shaking with it, and his face was nearly purple. I tell you the truth, Maeve, if you’d walked down the road at that minute, he would surely have killed you. Anyroad, he left me and went round a few of the other neighbours, but of course no one knew anything – you were right to keep it all to yourself. He went out, to the pub I suppose or else your uncle’s place. Anyroad, I didn’t see him come home again that night. I haven’t seen him since either. Trudy Gaskins, her that lives up the entry, said he’s moved into his mother’s place on the Pershore Road. She was up there the other night, because her daughter lives in the same road, and was on her time. She was with her all night and the next morning as she was getting ready to go home, she saw Brendan leaving his mother’s door.

The day after Elsie’s letter two more arrived for Maeve. One was from a confused Michael O’Toole. He said he presumed Maeve had run home and couldn’t understand why she’d done it, and Brendan, who’d been to his door, was just as confused as he was. The second letter, ill-written and ill-spelt, was from Brendan, demanding Maeve’s return. He reminded her she was his wife and therefore had a duty to him. Maeve barely finished the letter before she crumpled it in a ball and threw it into the fire.

She hoped any complaint and demands he was going to make would be confined to letters, for those she could handle. She’d had nightmares at first that he’d come straight after her, bawling and shouting, and was relieved as the second week drew to a close that that didn’t happen. She was beginning slowly to relax.

Not willing to tell the neighbours the whole tale of Maeve and her children fleeing from a drunken brutal husband and father, the Brannigans said the little family were on a wee holiday as the weans had been ill. No one doubted that when they looked at their pinched faces and, as it was just two weeks to the Easter holidays, the story was easy enough to believe. Coming away from Mass the first Sunday, Maeve was greeted by Father O’Brien. He hadn’t seen Maeve in years, but when he looked at the children’s stick-like arms and legs and the city pallor on their faces he thought it was a good job indeed that she’d brought them home for a wee while.

‘Come to get some fresh air in your lungs and some good food in your stomachs, have you?’ he asked them heartily.

The children regarded the priest gravely. They were used to priests and the strange way they had about them, and knew the best and easiest practice was always to agree. ‘Yes, Father,’ they said in unison.

The priest said a similar thing the next week and the children made a similar response. By then, most of the parish knew Maeve was home and not before time, most said, by the look of them all. She was welcomed by women of her own age she’d been at school with and scores of neighbours and friends she’d known for years. Many asked her up for an afternoon or evening, but she always made excuses not to go. She didn’t want to be asked any searching questions about her absent husband, or life back in Birmingham.

She was not unhappy. She was at peace and wanted nothing more than that.

The Easter holidays began and the days slid pleasantly one into another. The children followed their grandfather round the farm as he showed them the things growing in the ground, or lifted them up for rides on the tractor.

No animals frightened them now, not the barking boisterous dogs, nor the clucking hens, not even the strutting rooster, nor smelly pig and certainly not the cows that had startled them the first night. They thought their mournful brown eyes looked sad or wise or both, and when the cows stuck their heads over the fence to be stroked their fur felt like velvet and both children loved them.

All in all they were delighted with the place, which was as different from their own home as anything could possibly be. Also, for the first time, they enjoyed their lives free of stress and fear. Their faces had lost the wary look they’d had on arrival and Maeve marvelled at the difference in them after only a few weeks and knew she’d made the right decision to bring them home to Ireland.

The Wednesday before Easter, in Holy Week, Maeve went to confession one evening. It would be her second time, for she’d been to confession the first week she’d arrived, but she always went before Easter like all good Catholics.

She went through the usual litany of sins, feelings and expressing anger, small acts of spitefulness, the odd swearword or blasphemy, impatience, forgetting prayers, letting her attention slip at Mass and the odd impure thought that entered her mind.

When she finished, there was silence the other side of the grille and then the priest, his voice as cold as steel, said, ‘Go on, my child.’

‘I . . . I can’t think of any more sins, Father.’

‘Maeve, I’m ashamed of you,’ the priest said sternly. ‘You have shattered the sacrament of marriage in which God has joined you to Brendan Hogan for life. Yet you chose to walk out on him, depriving him of his wife and children. Don’t you think that is something to repent of and ask forgiveness for?’

Maeve was stunned. She wondered for a moment how he knew, but Father O’Brien then enlightened her without her having to ask. ‘Just this morning I received a most distressing letter from a Father Trelawney, whom I believe is the parish priest at St Catherine’s where you both attend.’

Maeve wasn’t even surprised. She might have known Brendan would go scurrying to his parish priest to enlist his help. He’d probably been urged on by his family, his domineering father and insignificant mother. ‘See the priest, son. See if he can bring her to her senses.’