Till the Sun Shines Through

Even with their help though when she finally alighted from the train at New Street Station, she felt exhausted and frightened, and stood on the windy, dirty platform, surrounded by bags, wishing she’d never come. She was scared witless of the noise around her. People shouted at each other above the din and there were sudden yells as people greeted others and sometimes gales of raucous laughter.

Porters rushed about with trolleys full of suitcases. ‘Out the way,’ they’d cry, or more politely, ‘Mind your backs.’ But above it all was the noise of the trains: the hiss of the water on the tracks, the pants of steam, the ear-splitting screech of the whistles and the roar of trains approaching other platforms, arriving in a cloud of smoke.

Never had she been so glad to see anything as she was to see Mary’s welcoming face, her warm, comfortable arms enveloping Bridie immediately and taking much of her fear away. ‘Oh God, Mary, how do you live in such a place?’ she cried. ‘How d’you stand it?’

‘Och, sure you get used to it,’ Mary said dismissively. ‘Come on away home. I’ve the house shining like a new pin and food fit for a king to cook for you.’

Bridie was terrified by the tram ride, far too frightened to take in the things of interest they passed which Mary pointed out to her. They alighted by the shops in a road called Bristol Street and she felt as if all her bones had been loosened. They turned up a little alleyway called Bristol Passage and came out into Bell Barn Road and Bridie stood for a moment and stared. There were row upon row of houses squashed up together, all grim and grey, matching the pavements and cobbled streets. But Mary didn’t seem to notice her sister’s horrified face. ‘Come on,’ she urged and, pointing down the road, added, ‘Aunt Ellen’s house is just down there. She’s in Bell Barn Road, and we’re just beside her in Grant Street. We’ll go around later, I’m seeing to things while she’s laid up.’

Mary’s front door opened straight onto the street, with another door in the entry leading down to the courtyard. Bridie was to find out during her stay that six houses opened on to that yard. The brewhouse was there too, where Mary, along with everyone else, did her washing on Mondays with the one shared tap. Mary told Bridie the tap often froze altogether in the winter, but added it was a grand place to hear all the gossip while you awaited your turn.

On fine Monday mornings, the washing lines crisscrossing the yard were filled with flapping washing, lifted into the sooty Birmingham air with the aid of tall props. The miskins were kept there too, where people tipped their ashes and where the communal dustbins often spilled rubbish on to the cobbles, and beside them, at the bottom of the yard, were lavatories which were shared by two families.

But that first day, looking around the inside of Mary’s room, Bridie thought it was as small as it had looked from the road. Her head was reeling. She had no understanding of such places, of so many people, families, living together: it seemed there was no space, no air for them to breathe at all.

And yet Mary seemed ridiculously proud of her house and she had made an effort for Bridie’s visit. A new rag rug was in front of the shining fender and the mantelshelf was dotted with plaster ornaments each side of the large wooden clock in the centre. Above the mantelpiece was the familiar picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and to the side of the fire was an alcove, which housed the wireless. Bridie remembered how Mary had written home in such excitement about it.

We have to have something called an accumulator to get it to work and have it charged at the garage on Bristol Street. However, really it’s no problem and grand altogether to have music on or even a play to listen to now and again.

‘We have a new gas cooker too now,’ Mary said proudly. ‘We used to cook on the fire when we first came here.’

Bridie had noticed the hooks on the chimney wall, reminiscent of her own home, and she now turned to look at the large, squat, gas cooker positioned between the table on one side and the door to the scullery on the other. There was also a press, which Mary called a sideboard, with more ornaments on it. ‘I keep good plates and glasses and such in there,’ Mary said as she tipped water from a lidded bucket into the kettle. ‘I don’t keep anything of importance in the scullery, the walls run with water in the winter.’

Bridie had a peep inside and could see, even on this summer’s day, what Mary meant. There was little there, just three shelves, housing a variety of odd plates and cups, a stone sink and steps leading to the coal cellar. There was no tap, but Bridie had expected none as Mary had already told her family when she wrote to them that they got their water from a tap in the yard that often froze altogether in the winter. ‘Shall I take my case up first and get settled in?’ she asked.

Mary nodded. ‘Aye, if you like. I’ll have a cup of tea waiting for you when you come down. I’d best start the tea or Eddie will be in on top of us and not a bite ready.’

‘Where am I to sleep?’

‘In the attic, pet,’ Mary said. ‘We’ve borrowed a mattress for you, but the sheets and blankets are my own. The bed’s made up for you, but you can put your things in the cupboard. There’s a hook if you want to hang anything up, unless it’s anything special like your clothes for Mass – I’ll put those in my wardrobe. Leave them down on my bed and I’ll see to them.’

In the attic another rag rug had been placed between the mattress laid on the floor and the cupboard, covering the bare boards. There was no other furniture and the room was dim with the only light coming from a dusty skylight.

Having put her belongings away, Bridie was glad to return to the living room. Mary had drawn the curtains and lit the gaslights which now popped and spluttered. She’d lit the fire too and it danced merrily in the hearth and Bridie was glad of it, for the evening had turned chilly. She had to admit that it all looked rather cosy. Mary handed her a cup of tea while she lit the gas beneath a pan of potatoes and another of cabbage.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘I don’t have to do the bacon for a while yet, so take the weight off your feet and tell me the news from home.’

What Bridie found particularly hardest to cope with in those early days in Birmingham was the noise. Inside the cottage in Ireland, it was often so quiet you could hear the peat settling into the grate, the ticking of the mantle clock, or her father puffing on his pipe.

Outside, she might hear the gentle lowing of the cows and the clucking of the hens, or the sweet singing of the birds. She’d hear the wind setting, the trees swaying and the soft swishing sound as the breeze rippled through the long grass, or the river rumbling as it ran across its stony bed.

There was nothing to prepare her for this crush of humanity, the walls so thin every sound the neighbours made could be heard. She hated the shrieking of the children in the street just outside the window and the cackling laughter and shouting of the women doing their washing in the brewhouse. She hated the tramp of hobnail boots on the cobbles as the men made their way to work and the factory hooters slicing into the quiet of early morning.

But most of all she hated the traffic: the clanking trams and rumbling omnibuses, the roar of petrol-drawn lorries and vans and cars. Even the dull clop of horses’ hooves disturbed her. These city horses were as unlike those at home as it was possible to be. They were tired and sad-looking. And why wouldn’t they be, Bridie thought, with hard roads beneath their feet day in, day out. She wondered where they were stabled because there was precious little grass to be found. She guessed the horses saw as little of it as the people.

And that was another thing, the people. They unnerved her. She supposed they were kind enough, but their voices grated on her and she could barely understand what they said anyway, their accents were so alien. She couldn’t seem to get away anywhere to be alone, to have a bit of privacy, and she wondered if Rosalyn would have made a better fist of it than she was doing. Frowning, she admitted she probably would.

She couldn’t say any of this to Mary though. How could she? Mary had chosen to make her home in this hateful place and so Bridie couldn’t go around moaning and complaining. But she was incredibly homesick and eventually felt if she didn’t tell someone how she felt she would burst and so, without mentioning a word to Mary, she poured her heart out to her mother in a letter, telling her everything that she hated about the city her sister lived in. She told her parents of something else too. She’d wondered when she’d arrived why there were so many idle men about. They lolled on street corners, hands usually in their pockets and flat caps on their head. Back home in Ireland, she’d seldom seen a man idle in the middle of the day, unless it was a Fair Day, and she’d asked Mary about it, revealing all to her parents in a letter home:

Mary said the men have been that way since they were demobbed from the army. There is no work for them and many of the families are starving. I know she’s right, for you only have to see the children, with pinched-in faces like old people’s and so thin they’re just skin and bone. They have arms like sticks and quite a few have running sores on their body. Most of them are clothed in rags and many are barefoot. Aunt Ellen said even in the dead of winter it’s just the same.

Bridie was no stranger to running barefoot. In her mind, to cast off her shoes and run across the springy turf and leap the streams was linked to the freedom of summer – few children back home wore shoes then. However, in September, before she returned to school, along with the schoolbooks and jotters her parents bought her, there would be a pair of shoes. They mightn’t be new, but they would be freshly soled and heeled, and there would be stockings too to keep her from freezing altogether.

She looked at the children around the streets and hanging around the Bull Ring when she went there with Mary and wondered if many of them had ever had shoes. She doubted that when the winter chill came they’d have thicker clothes to wear either, or a good, warm coat and hats, gloves and scarves to keep the life in them.

It’s awful, Mammy, is surely is to see so many people living like this, she wrote.

There had been poverty at home in Ireland, of course there had, and people with large families they could barely feed used to get food vouchers from the St Vincent de Paul fund. The nuns there would find clothes for the children to wear, but here it was the sheer numbers of poor that overwhelmed her.

It bothered Sarah too when she read Bridie’s letter. ‘Fancy not having shoes for the winter,’ she remarked. ‘Although I shouldn’t think it’s pleasant running barefoot through city streets at any time.’

‘It’s the men out of work that I feel sorry for,’ Jimmy said. ‘God, what that would do to a man, not being able to provide for his family. Seems to me Ireland wasn’t the only one betrayed by that damned war. “Land fit for heroes” and they can’t earn a bite to put in their families’ mouths.’

‘Aye,’ Sarah agreed with a sigh. ‘It must be dreadful and Bridie doesn’t seem to be enjoying it at all.’

‘Ah well, she’ll soon be home again,’ Jimmy said, ‘and then life will go back to normal. No danger of Bridie taking a liking to the place and wanting to live there anyway.’ And that made Jimmy a happy man – it would make his world complete if, when Bridie did decide to marry, it was to one of the local boys and she’d live not far from them.

‘Aye,’ Sarah said with feeling, for she’d missed her youngest daughter and longed to have her home again. When she’d been placed in Sarah’s arms after her birth, Sarah thought she’d never rear her. She thought she’d go the way of the three she lost to TB after Johnnie. Then when Robert and Nuala had both died, she was convinced that Bridie would never reach adulthood. But here she was, on the threshold of it, and still fit and healthy, as beautiful and kindly as ever. ‘Aye, she’ll be home soon enough,’ Sarah said with satisfaction. ‘And, if you ask me, I think it will be a long time before she goes so far again.’ She could have added, ‘Unlike Mary.’ She’d been so upset when Mary went on her wee holiday in the spring of 1926 and had fallen in love with a man called Eddie Coghlan. It had only helped slightly that Eddie was from Derry and a good Catholic into the bargain, because it still meant their daughter would be living and bringing up any grandchildren miles away from them.

Sarah had been inclined to blame her sister and wrote her a letter telling her so but, as Jimmy said, love is not a thing you can watch out for. Ellen couldn’t have known that Mary would lose her heart to a man at the Easter dance they’d taken her to at their local Parish Church. At least, he’d said in Eddie’s defence, he was in work, not everyone was as fortunate.

So Eddie was welcomed into the family and Sarah never admitted how much she missed her eldest daughter. As long as she had Bridie, she told herself, she would be content, so Sarah was glad Bridie was disliking the place so much.

But, little by little, Bridie got used to the noise and bustle of the city and started to enjoy her stay at Mary’s. Eddie went out of his way to make her welcome, but she most enjoyed the times she had alone with Mary. One day, when they were alone in the house, she asked her a question that had been playing on her mind since she arrived, for Mary looked far rounder than she remembered her. ‘Mary, are you having a baby?’

‘Aye. Didn’t Mammy tell you?’

‘No. Why didn’t you? You never said in your letters.’

‘It’s silly to say the same thing twice,’ Mary said. ‘I write to you about different things, but I did think Mammy would say. I’m five months now. What did you think, that I’d just put on weight?’ Without waiting for Bridie’s reply, she asked, ‘Would you like to feel it kick?’

Bridie flushed and looked at her as if she couldn’t believe her ears. ‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Not at all.’

Bridie put her hand out and felt the child move beneath her fingers and saw the material of the smock Mary had on ripple. She was awed by the thought of a living being inside her sister. And then, because it was her sister and she felt comfortable enough, she asked the question she’d puzzled over for an age: ‘Mary, how did it get in there?’

Mary was surprised Bridie hadn’t tumbled to it living on a farm. But then she remembered Bridie was always sent elsewhere when the bull or rams were due to service their cows and sheep. It was an effort to protect her, Mary supposed, but children could be protected too much.

She bit on her lip as she considered whether to divulge the whole matter of sex with her younger sister. She’d never get the information from their mother, she knew that, because she’d never discuss anything so intimate. Mary had got all her information from Aunt Ellen and she often thanked God she had.

So she told Bridie how the seed inside her had grown into a baby and watched Bridie’s eyes open wider and wider in shock as she spoke. ‘Something else occurs before a woman can have a baby,’ Mary told her. ‘They’re called periods and they mean you bleed from your private parts every month. You need to know: I began mine at school and because I hadn’t been warned, I thought I was dying. Sister Ambrose eventually found me in the toilets, limp from crying, and explained it to me and took me home.’

‘Was Mammy cross?’

‘No,’ Mary said. ‘But she was embarrassed. She told me she had linen pads in the press ready and I was to pin one to my liberty bodice. When they were soiled I was to put them in the bucket she’d leave ready and that respectable women didn’t need to know any more than that, in fact they didn’t need to talk of it at all.’

‘And that bleeding happens to every woman every month?’ Bridie asked, curling her mouth in distaste.

‘Aye,’ Mary said, smiling at her sister’s discomfort. ‘I’m afraid it does. It’s a sort of preparation for motherhood and even people like Aunt Ellen, who’ve never had children, have periods.’

‘So, when … How will I know when it will be?’ Bridie asked.

‘Your body will change first,’ Mary told her. ‘Your breasts will begin to grow and you’ll get hair down below.’

Bridie let out a sigh of relief. She’d been horrified to see the little swellings around her nipples and even more so to see hair sprouting where it had never done before, certain that she was abnormal and too worried to even contemplate discussing it with Rosalyn.

Mary heard the sigh and saw the relief, but hid her smile. She was glad she’d told her. ‘But,’ she cautioned her, ‘don’t you be telling Mammy about this, d’you hear? She’ll have my mouth washed out with carbolic.’

‘I won’t,’ Bridie promised with a giggle, visualising her mother forcing a bar of soap into Mary’s mouth. ‘I’m glad you’ve told me. I’ve wondered, you know.’

‘Of course you’ve wondered, it’s natural,’ Mary said. ‘And you needed to be told. But one thing I do agree with Mammy about is respecting yourself. It’s all the advice she ever gave me, but for all that she was right. Boys will try to … well, you know what I mean, and if you let them, they’ll not respect you anymore. Wait for the ring like I did. Believe me, it’s worth it.’

‘I don’t know if I want to get married,’ Bridie said doubtfully. ‘I don’t think I want to be doing that sort of thing to make babies either.’

‘Oh you will, little sister,’ Mary said with a laugh. ‘You will.’

CHAPTER TWO

Almost as soon as Terry picked Bridie up at the docks three weeks later, she knew there was something wrong with him. But she also knew to press him would only annoy and so she waited for him to tell her.

She hadn’t long to wait: Terry was bursting to tell somebody his news and as soon as they were seated on the train, he couldn’t contain himself. Bridie looked at him in astonishment. ‘Leave the farm? But, Terry …’

‘Hear me out first,’ Terry said, ‘and then judge if you want to, Bridie.’

Bridie nodded and Terry went on. ‘Look at me – I’m twenty years old in a week’s time, I never go out, I’ve never dated a girl in all my life and why? Because I never get a penny piece of my own, that’s why. Oh, they point out, Mam and Dad, that this place will be mine one day – Seamus will hardly want it – and they remind me I have a warm house and plenty of food and clothes bought for me when I need them. Aye, I do, working clothes and a suit for Mass that I never even get to choose the colour and style of.

‘I can’t stand it, I tell you, Bridie. I don’t like farming anyway, never have, and I won’t grub around in this place for much longer, with Mammy doling out small amounts of money to me for the collection at Mass as if I was a wean.’

Bridie saw some of the injustices of Terry’s predicament that she’d never realised before. ‘Oh, Terry,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you tell Mammy and Daddy how you feel?’

‘Do you think I haven’t tried?’ Terry snapped. ‘It’s like talking to a brick wall.’

‘But where will you go?’

‘New York,’ Terry said. ‘Seamus and Johnnie said they’d send me the fare.’

‘But what about a job?’ Bridie said, for she knew as well as any that unemployment was rife everywhere since the Great War and getting worse. ‘It’s as bad there as here. Worse, in fact. They have soup kitchens in America, Terry.’

‘I know,’ Terry said. ‘That’s the threat Mam and Dad use when I’ve mentioned it to them. Not that I’ve said that much, you know. I’ve just tested the ground as it were. I wrote to Johnnie and he said he can probably get me set on alongside him in time. There’s nothing for now, but he’s keeping an eye out and will send for me. I’m willing to work. I’ll not go to America and live off him and Seamus, never fear. All I’m waiting for is word and the money for the fare.’

Bridie knew then that eventually Terry would go. It might be weeks or even months, but he wouldn’t stay.

However, the weeks rolled by and soon winter was upon them again and still no word came from America. Still and all, Bridie told herself, there might not be a place in America for Terry for a long while. She couldn’t imagine Johnnie and Seamus to be the only Irish boys with relations clamouring to join them. The dole queues in America were as long as those anywhere else and why would they take another person into the country when it made more sense to employ one of their own?

That winter proved to be a severe one and both Jimmy and Francis were worried about their pregnant ewes. Rosalyn came over one day and complained how bad-tempered her father had become lately. Bridie expressed surprise – Francis usually had a smile on his face and had a far more relaxed attitude to life than his brother Jimmy.

They were, as usual, in the barn and Rosalyn peered out of the barn window as she said, ‘Poor things to be born in this anyway.’ She rubbed at the window with a mittened hand, clearing the ice. ‘I mean just look at it,’ she said. The landscape before them was covered in snow blown into drifts at the sides of the fields and gilding the trees and hedges.

Bridie shivered, despite her thick coat. ‘Aye, you’d think they’d wait till spring is really here and the snow had at least disappeared,’ she said. ‘I think God slipped up there.’

Rosalyn gave her a push. ‘Don’t let the priest hear you say that, Bridie McCarthy,’ she said in mock severity while her eyes twinkled. ‘You’ll spend the rest of your life on your knees repenting, you will.’

‘Aye? Well, I’ll say one for you when I’m down there,’ Bridie promised with a smile.

But in all truth there was not much to smile about during those bitterly cold days and the only bright news at all that awful January was that Mary had given birth to a baby and named him Jamie after her father. Jimmy was ridiculously pleased by the gesture and that evening talked of Mary coming home when the baby was a bit older. ‘Show me my namesake,’ he said with a broad grin.

Bridie was glad to see that smile; for far too long her father had had a frown creasing his brow. It was a pity, then, that Terry had to spoil it. ‘Aye, that’s right. Get another one back here that you can chain to the bloody land.’

‘I chain nobody, boy.’

‘Yes you bloody do,’ Terry said, leaping up and reaching for his coat.

‘Where are you going? There’s work to do.’

‘Oh,’ said Terry in mock surprise. ‘You surprise me! Work, is there? Well, get some other silly bugger to do it. I’m away out.’

‘Terry! Come back here!’

As the door slammed shut, Bridie looked fearfully at her father, but he made no effort to follow his wayward son. The peat in the fire settled and hissed and the clock’s tick seemed very loud. Everyone seemed fearful of breaking the silence and Bridie picked up a sock from the mending basket by her mother’s feet and began to darn the large hole in the heel.

By mid-March, the long months of the winter were behind them. The snow and ice were long gone, the lambs had all been born fine and healthy and spring planting was going on apace. The sun was shining in a bright blue sky and Bridie, having celebrated her fourteenth birthday in February, felt happy with her world.

She was, however, rather at a loose end. It was a Saturday and also a Fair Day in the town, where the farmers bought and sold their stock. Terry and her daddy had gone in early with some calves to sell. They’d offered her a lift into town, but she’d said she’d not felt like it that day but then, calling to see Rosalyn, she found she’d also gone into town with her own brother and father very early that morning. ‘She thought you’d be gone in too,’ said Delia.

‘No,’ Bridie said. ‘Daddy offered, but I didn’t fancy it today. Never mind, I’ll see Rosalyn later.’

After helping her mother all morning, she’d been too fidgety to stay in and had gone out tramping the hills later that afternoon. Everyone seemed either to be indoors or in town because she met not a soul and so was pleased on her return to see her uncle Francis approaching her as she neared the outskirts of the farm. She waved to him.