Walking Back to Happiness

ANNE BENNETT

Walking Back to Happiness

Dedication

This book is written for my mother Eileen Josephine Flanagan and is dedicated to her memory.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Hannah Delaney looked down at her sister, Frances Mullen, and knew she’d never leave her bed again. She felt tears prickle the back of her eyes as she reached for Frances’s yellow, emaciated hand, but she held them back. If Frances could be brave about her impending death, then so could she. ‘You’re a grand girl, Hannah,’ Frances said in little more than a hoarse whisper. ‘Thank you for coming.’

Hannah’s face flushed at the implied reproach. ‘You didn’t bother when I sent for you when my husband, Paddy, was coughing his guts up in the County Hospital,’ Frances might have said.

Hannah knew Frances must have been badly hurt but there had been a desperate reason why she’d not been able to come back when Paddy lay dying and one she could never share with Frances, nor with any of the family. Hannah had told Frances she had the ’flu and wasn’t well enough to travel. She hadn’t even come for the funeral and no one could guess how heartsore she was that she couldn’t come and mourn the man who’d always been more of a father to her than her own and maybe be a measure of support to her sister.

The townsfolk couldn’t understand it at all. ‘People have the ‘flu all the time and get over it,’ they’d said to Frances. ‘Why doesn’t she come for a wee visit now to see how you all are?’

‘Sure, isn’t she rushed off her feet with the fine job she has?’ Frances had answered the criticisms. But inside, she’d ached for the presence of her youngest sister. She’d reared her and had loved her like one of her own, but she seemed to have forgotten all that, for she’d not been near the place for three years.

But now she was here and suddenly to Frances it didn’t matter any more. There was little time to waste on censure and argument and Hannah certainly had no wish to quarrel. She’d always loved Frances dearly and she was saddened that she had such little time left.

‘Why wouldn’t I come?’ she said with a forced smile, giving her sister’s hand a gentle squeeze. ‘Aren’t you the only mother I ever knew and don’t I love you more than anyone in the whole world? If there’s anything I can do for you, you only have to say.’

Frances gave a wry smile and a little sigh. So, she thought, God does answer prayers, some prayers. He couldn’t spare her any longer and God knows at times she was tired enough not to care, but now Josie would be all right. She’d fretted about the child, worried to death that Hannah wouldn’t come, that she wouldn’t be able to ask her.

Frances studied her sister, while she framed the question she had to ask. She wasn’t worried Hannah would refuse. How could she? She’d taken Hannah in when she was just a day old, when their mother had died of childbirth fever. Frances’s third child, Martin, had been only a week old himself and she also had Miriam just fifteen months and Peter coming up to three yet she’d not hesitated to offer Hannah a home. And for that reason Hannah owed her a debt. ‘It’s Josie,’ she said. ‘Will you take Josie? Will you look after her when it’s … when it’s all over?’

‘Josie?’ That dark, secretive, plain child, the one Hannah hardly knew at all for she’d been born after she’d left the farm and always seemed to disappear whenever she’d come for her very occasional visits home.

She’d scarcely ever given the child a thought, for Frances had done what their own mother had done and had a large gap in the family and the nearest in age to Josie was Sam, who at twenty was eleven years her senior. Hannah knew from the letters her sister had written that Sam had been living in the mountains, working their grandparents’ farm since he’d left school at fourteen. If Josie was to go there, she’d become a maid of all work, her childhood would be over and Hannah well knew that.

But for God’s sake, there was a fine family of them. Surely to God one of them could look after their own sister?

But in her heart she knew she was the only one left. Peter had become a priest and was living away in the Scottish Highlands somewhere and poor Miriam was married to a man she had met on a brief visit to England. She returned with him to his home in Connemara where, according to Frances, they tried to scratch a living from the stones. At twenty-eight, she’d been married eight years and had eight children.

Miriam had not come home for her father’s illness or funeral either and gave the excuse she was almost on her time, but Frances had suspected she couldn’t afford to come. Even if she’d have offered a home to Josie, Hannah knew Frances wouldn’t have been happy sending her there.

But then what about Martin who was twenty-seven, the same age as herself, and Siobhan two years younger? Martin had coped with the farm single-handed since his father had died, but Hannah, who’d been brought up alongside him and understood him better than the others, knew he was no farmer. He’d always wanted to go to New York; he used to talk about it all the time. And now he and Siobhan had the chance. Their Aunt Norah had offered to send them the fare.

Martin had been unable to contain his excitement when he’d met Hannah off the train. ‘It’s like a dream,’ he’d said, as he’d set the old pony pulling the cart to canter over the cobblestones. ‘I thought I was stuck on the farm for years, you know, I mean with Da gone? I’d never have left Mammy and God knows I wished no harm to her but … well, the old place won’t be the same without her.’

There was no place in bustling New York and their aunt’s plush apartment for a child either. It hadn’t been said openly, but it was understood.

That left Margaret and Ellen, only Margaret was now known as Sister Ambrose, one of the ‘Sisters of the Poor’. If the war hadn’t raged on for six horrifying years, she would already be in Africa teaching the heathens about the love of Jesus. Now that it was over, she was just awaiting a ship’s return to civilian duties.

Ellen was twenty-one and getting married. But even as Hannah thought of her, she immediately rejected the idea. She was marrying a farmer and would have to live with his parents and two sisters and a brother in a small farmhouse with only two bedrooms. A young sister in tow, too, would make the place even more cramped.

She wondered suddenly where she might have ended up if it hadn’t been for Frances. She might have been pushed from pillar to post, one relative to another. Or left with her morose, sullen father who blamed her for her mother’s death. There was the rub though. Frances had been there, solid, welcoming and loving, and now her dying wish was for Hannah to care for her youngest child.

The trouble was Hannah was marrying Mr Bradley in late summer and she didn’t know how he’d take to her looking after Josie. They’d never talked about children, and she didn’t know how he’d feel being landed with a nine-year-old girl.

Well, he’d have to put up with it, she decided suddenly, for she owed her sister and this was pay out time. ‘Is it such a hard thing to ask?’ Frances asked, and Hannah realised the silence had stretched out between them uncomfortably, while the thoughts had tumbled about her head. ‘No,’ she said untruthfully. ‘No, not at all. I was just wondering how I’d manage being at work all day. And she doesn’t know me at all. How does she feel about it?’

‘She doesn’t know. How could I tell her? I didn’t know if you’d agree.’

‘When does she think … I mean, does she know?’

‘That I’m dying?’ Frances said. ‘Oh aye, she knows. At least I think she does. She’s not a stupid girl. She’s seen the doctor come and go and the priest and I haven’t left my bed now for over a week. I haven’t actually told her, but I think she knows.’

Frances was right, Josie did know her mother was dying. She’d listened at doors, a common practice when she wanted to know about anything she knew none of her family would tell her, and heard it said plainly. She wasn’t totally surprised at the gravity of her mother’s illness for she’d watched her become weaker and weaker and her skin and eyes take on a yellowish tinge, and she shed many tears that she’d kept hidden from her family.

But still she’d hoped and prayed. God, she’d spent so long on her knees and lit so many candles and said a special novena for the sick, she’d thought it just had to work. Father Mulligan said God answered prayers and if your faith was as small as a mustard seed you could move mountains. But Josie’s mother got more and more frail with each passing day and Josie lost faith in the priest’s words. She thought it a stupid thing to want to move mountains from place to place anyway, and surely to cure someone like her Mammy, who was so loved and needed, had to be easier than that.

But as her Mammy got worse instead of better, Josie had begun to feel lonely and afraid. She’d got used to her mother not being around by the time Hannah arrived, for she hadn’t been well this long time and Siobhan and Ellen had seen to things. She knew it wouldn’t last. Ellen was set to marry and Siobhan … she knew what was planned for her and Martin. Not a word had been said to her, it was amazing what people talked about when they didn’t know you were there, and she shivered in fear, for she hadn’t a clue who was going to look after her.

Josie found out who would the day after Hannah arrived, and then she stared at her mother in horror. She wanted to stamp her feet and shout and scream, but she couldn’t do that in front of a woman as sick as her Mammy. But surely she could see Josie couldn’t live with Hannah, someone she didn’t know in a strange country? God, it was hard enough losing her mother, she’d barely come to terms with that, without leaving behind all that was familiar. ‘Mammy,’ she said in a voice thick with unshed tears. ‘Mammy, I don’t want to go to England and I don’t want to live with Aunt Hannah – I don’t know her.’

‘You will, child. By the time it is all over, you’ll know her.’

‘Don’t, Mammy.’

‘Cutie dear,’ Frances said gently, ‘sit up here beside me,’ and she patted the bed.

Josie sat, but gingerly, knowing how even a sudden movement could hurt her mother for she was so thin that the bones in her body were visible. And now one of those stick-thin arms trailed around Josie’s neck as Frances held her daughter close. ‘Oh, Mammy! Why have you to die?’

Frances was a little while answering. She battled with tears behind her own eyes at the unfairness of life. How she hated leaving this youngest child an orphan at such a young age. She’d have liked to have had a few more years till she was older, maybe married, certainly better able to cope. But it wasn’t to be. She knew it, everyone knew it, and it would be no kindness to allow Josie to harbour any sort of false hope. ‘I don’t know why I have to die, Josie. Aren’t we all in God’s hands?’

‘If you ask me, he’s not doing a very good job of it,’ Josie said fiercely and Frances didn’t chide her for she’d had many of the same thoughts.

‘If I have to go anyway, can’t I go with our Ellen?’

‘You know there will be no room for you there, child.’

‘Granny’s then?’

But even as Josie spoke, she gave a shudder of distaste. She hated her grandparents’ farm high in the Wicklow hills. There was nothing cosy about the bleak, thatched cottage they lived in and no comfort to be had either in or out of it. She could never understand Sam liking the backbreaking work he had to do to scrape a living from the hills, or how he managed to live with his grandparents, their granda finding fault with everything and their granny not knowing what day of the week it was.

‘There’s no one to see to you there.’

‘I can see to myself,’ Josie retorted, bristling.

‘Aye, and you’d have to see to everyone else in the place,’ Frances said, adding bitterly, ‘I had my share of it and I don’t want it for you. Sam gets away with it for he’s a boy. Believe me, Josie, your childhood would be over the minute you stepped over the doorstep and you’d skivvy every hour of the day.’ She gave Josie a squeeze and pleaded, ‘Come on, pet. Don’t make this even harder for me.’

After that what could Josie do? She looked at her mother’s saddened face and saw that her eyes were brimming with tears and knew that she couldn’t add to her distress by arguing further.

Frances seemed to sink rapidly after her talk with Josie. Ellen and Siobhan took on most of the nursing of their mother, Margaret was released from the convent and Miriam was sent for. Josie, from the necessity of taking on many of the household jobs, often found herself working alongside Hannah. She wondered sometimes if Hannah had arranged this, but she didn’t care if she had or not. All she knew was that her mother was losing her grip on life and there was damn all she could do about it.

Hannah tried to get her talking, asking questions about the farm and school and her friends and what she did with her free time, but Josie wouldn’t play. She always answered her questions, she was too polite to ignore her altogether, but she did so tersely. She never introduced a subject herself and seemed not a bit interested in her aunt’s life or the place where she lived.

The tense atmosphere between Hannah and Josie changed a few days later. Josie had crept in to her mother’s bedroom, knowing for once she could see her alone. She intended to have one last try at convincing her Mammy that she couldn’t live in a stuffy, alien city with an aunt she didn’t know and didn’t like much either and that surely there was a friend or relative she could stay with.

The Tilley lamp was turned low and the candle before the Sacred Heart of Jesus lent little from its flickering flame. The priest had been that day and the room smelt of the oils he’d used to anoint Frances. Awed and a little frightened, for Josie hadn’t seen her mother since she’d told her she was to live with Hannah, she soundlessly crept nearer to the bed. ‘Mammy!’

Josie watched her mother dragging her heavy lids open as if they weighed a ton and she stared at her daughter through pain-glazed eyes and without a spark of recognition. ‘Mammy, it’s me, Josie.’

Frances looked at her for a moment longer before letting her eyelids drop closed again and Josie stood in the room watching her, biting her thumb, while tears rained down her cheeks. It was if her mother was already dead. Josie fled from the room, hurtling down the stairs and out through the front door, avoiding everyone gathered in the kitchen.

It was teatime before she was missed. By then, Ellen knew she had been into their mother’s room for she’d left the door wide open and none of the others would have done that. She said she’d have a few sharp words to say when Josie did come home.

Hannah put two and two together. She knew that Frances’s drug dosage had been raised to try and give her ease from the intense pain, but Josie hadn’t been told. Nor had she been told that Frances, drugged and pain-riddled, seldom knew any of them anymore. She thought for a moment and then without a word to the others, she slipped out into the yard.

She heard the muffled sobbing as soon as she opened the barn door and she followed it up the ladder leading to the upper floor, the very place she’d always made for whenever she was upset. Barely had her head pushed through the opening, than she saw Josie spread-eagled across the straw bales.

But despite the stealth that Hannah had used so as not to startle the girl, Josie heard her. She raised her head, her face blotchy from crying, but her eyes flashed fire. ‘What d’you want?’ she spat out. ‘Go away! Leave me alone!’

Hannah ignored the anger in Josie’s voice, for behind it she heard the knot of raw pain. She eased herself through the hole and sat on a bale nearby, but not too near to Josie, who’d buried her head once more into the straw and refused to look at her aunt. ‘I used to come here too,’ Hannah said, conversationally. ‘There’s something comforting about the smell of straw.’

There was no movement from Josie, but Hannah knew she was listening intently. ‘I’ll miss Frances too,’ she said. ‘She was the only mother I ever knew. And I might as well have had no father either,’ she added bitterly. ‘Frances said he was so mad with grief, he hadn’t even a name for me. The priest suggested Hannah. It was his mother’s name.’

Josie knew the story. It had often been talked of in the family. ‘Your daddy was like my daddy too,’ Hannah went on. ‘He used to talk to me if I got upset. I loved him dearly.’

Josie raised her head. ‘Then why didn’t you come to the funeral?’ she asked, accusingly. ‘Everyone was asking.’

‘I was ill.’

‘After, then. Mammy used to get upset and cry at night.’

There was a silence between them and then Hannah gave a sigh. ‘There were reasons,’ she said quietly. ‘One day I may even tell you what they were, but what matters now is you and me.’ And then, because she’d sensed the girl’s antagonism towards her from the beginning, she asked, ‘Will you hate living with me so much?’

Josie swung around and stared at Hannah and decided to be truthful. ‘Yes, I will. I don’t know you or anything about England and I don’t want to know either. I don’t want to leave here.’

Hannah thought that now was not the time to tell Josie she wasn’t keen on looking after her either. ‘We can’t all have what we want, Josie,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried to get to know you the last few days, but you … Look, pet, we must make the best of it for your mother’s sake. Give it a year? If after that you’re still miserable, I promise we’ll look at it again.’

And then what? Josie thought. Maybe she could induce Martin or Siobhan to send for her to go to America, but would she like that any better? ‘At least when your Mammy died, you didn’t have to leave the place altogether,’ she cried.

‘No, no I didn’t, and like I said, I’ll always be in your parents’ debt because of what they did. After a while, people forgot I was really Hannah Delaney. I was known as one of the Mullens.’

‘Did you care?’

‘Not at first. I wanted to belong somewhere. My own sisters and brothers became like strangers till one by one they took the emigrant boats to the States till only my eldest brother, Eamonn, was left to farm the land with my father. He doesn’t really know me though and I don’t know him and for a time it was nice being thought of as one of you lot. It was as I got older that I resented Hannah Delaney being swamped altogether.’

‘Is that why you left?’

‘Partly,’ Hannah admitted. ‘I wanted to start afresh. Stand on my own two feet, just to see if I could. A good friend of mine, Molly McGuire, had left Ireland just the previous year and we promised to write to each other. She got a job easily in a hotel in Leeds. It was called The Hibernian, reputed to be the biggest, best and of course most expensive in the town. The wages weren’t great, she told me, but the tips were legion. She said she could get me a job, straight off.’

Hannah stopped there, remembering her indecision. She didn’t want to upset Frances, and she knew she would if she was to follow her friend. But she knew she’d regret it if she didn’t go while she had the chance. As she dithered, Molly challenged her. Hadn’t she always said she wanted to see something of other places? Hadn’t she always said she didn’t want to live the whole of her life in Ireland and wasn’t there a big, wide world out there to explore?

And she was right. Hannah had said all those things and meant them, too, but the actual leaving was hard, especially when she loved Frances as dearly as she would any mother and Paddy and the others, too. She knew she would miss them all.

In the end, she poured her heart out to Paddy and he patted her hand and told her not to fret, that it was natural to want to spread your wings when you were young. ‘But Frances …’ she had wailed.

‘Frances will come around, never fret, I’ll talk to her,’ Paddy had promised.

‘Was Mammy upset when you left?’ Josie asked, jolting Hannah back to the present.

‘Very. I was sad too. God, it was a wrench to go. People said I was ungrateful to leave when I could have been such a help to Frances at long last. Frances never said that and I doubt she ever thought of it, she wasn’t like that. She said she’d miss me so much, but she wished me Godspeed. It broke me up and we cried together as we hugged, and for a while, my resolve weakened. It was your father who said to go and satisfy myself and to remember I had a home to come back to if it didn’t work out.

‘Not everyone saw it like that of course, but then all my life people have been telling me how grateful I should be to Frances and I was grateful to her. But that level of gratitude gets to be a heavy burden when you’re reminded of it constantly. Not that your parents ever spoke about it, it was others, the relatives who hadn’t wanted me themselves, or neighbours who felt justified to speak as they chose because they’d known me all my life.’

‘And did you like it in this Leeds place?’ Josie asked.

‘I did not and that’s the truth,’ Hannah said, remembering her horror at the grim greyness of the place and how the opulence of the hotel unnerved her and the way she could barely understand the way the other girls spoke. She was achingly lonely and many, many times thought she’d made a mistake because she missed her family so very much. She missed the farm too and often longed for the sight of a green mossy hill, springy turf beneath her feet, and good clean air to fill her lungs with.

‘I didn’t mind the work,’ she said. ‘I was well used to work, but everything was so strange and when Molly got married and moved to London only months after I arrived, it was worse. We wrote for a while, but in the end the letters petered out. A girl called Tilly Galston shared my room then.’

‘Was she nice?’

Hannah smiled as she remembered the good friend she’d been and the way she pulled her out of the morose self-pitying attitude she’d been in danger of developing. ‘I’d have gone home if it hadn’t been for her,’ Hannah said. ‘She wouldn’t let me.’

‘How could she stop you?’

‘Oh, she was very bossy,’ Hannah said. ‘But funny too, you know. She could always see the bright side of things and could always make me laugh. She bullied me into going out and about too and making an effort with the other girls. We were good friends.’

‘Where is she now?’

Hannah shrugged. ‘Still in Leeds, I suppose,’ she said. ‘At least she was there when I left and moved to Birmingham.’