Читать книгу Till the Sun Shines Through - Anne Bennett - Страница 6

Both Bridie McCarthy and her cousin Rosalyn were lying across the straw bales on the upper floor of the barn, the place both girls made for when they needed a bit of peace. Rosalyn was reading the latest letter from Bridie’s sister Mary, who was married and living in Birmingham and had written asking if Bridie could come and stay with her a wee while before school opened again in September.

Rosalyn handed the letter back to Bridie with a sigh. ‘You’re so lucky,’ she said.

Bridie didn’t contradict her cousin. Instead she said, ‘Well, Mary did promise I could go on a visit when she had her own place. You mind they had to stay with Aunt Ellen first after their marriage last year?’ She hugged her knees with delight. ‘I can’t wait.’

‘I bet,’ Rosalyn said. ‘Anything would be better than this place day after day.’ She crossed to the barn window and Bridie got to her feet and joined her. ‘It’s not to see Birmingham,’ she told Rosalyn. ‘It’s to see Mary. I’ve missed her so much since she left. Before then – Mary leaving and all – I thought life would just go on the same way year in, year out.’

‘For me it does.’

‘No, even for you there’s change,’ Bridie reminded her. ‘For a start you’ll be working in the shirt factory in Donegal town in a few weeks, now that you’re fourteen, instead of going back to school.’

‘Aye, I’ll work longer hours, give most of my pay to Mammy and still be at her beck and call when I’m home. “Rosalyn, do this, or that, wash the dishes, see to the weans, change the baby”. God, it would sicken you.’

Bridie burst out laughing. ‘Don’t be such a grouch,’ she said.

‘Well, don’t you ever want something to happen?’ Rosalyn demanded. ‘God, Bridie, there must be more to life than this.’

Bridie looked out at the farm and countryside she loved with all her heart, where the sun shone down from a cloudless sky giving everything a glow. In front of the squat whitewashed cottage the hens strutted about the yard, pecking the grain that had fallen between the cobbles, while the cows placidly chewed the cud in the lush fields and occasionally leaned their heads on the five-bar gate to watch the world go by. To the side of the house was the orchard, the trees heavy with fruit at that time of the year. Much of the fruit would be picked in another month or so, Bridie knew, and bottled or made into jam, except for the apples. They would be stored in straw-layered barrels in the barn.

Everywhere she looked there were trees and greenness and beauty and it always left her with deep satisfaction to look upon it. There were other cottages like their own dotted about, all on the same lines and most with a curl of smoke wafting from the chimneys. Some cottages seemed almost to nestle in the verdant green Donegal hills that were dotted with sheep who tugged relentlessly at the grass.

The lane to the road divided the cows’ field from the tilled ground where Bridie could see her father and her brother Terry working. Just a little way along that road the lane meandered down to run alongside the rail bus tracks at the bottom of the farm.

The red and cream diesel-driven rail buses had been a feature of Bridie’s life since as far back as she could remember. Her father had told her rail bus tracks were laid all over Donegal and ran on narrow rails because they had to climb and dip over unaccommodating hills, or negotiate other austere landscapes. He’d said they had opened up life for the people in the outlying farms and villages, which had been fairly isolated until then.

The one that ran past the bottom of the McCarthy farm came from the port of Killybegs in the west. In the cars and trucks pulled behind the rail bus would be fish from Killybegs, and cattle, sheep and produce from the surrounding farms. The rail bus would bring back vital foodstuffs, coal and Guinness from the north.

It also took fathers to work and mothers to shop. Bridie had been on it herself a few times with her mother, as far as Donegal Town, on the rare occasions when no one was taking the cart in. She’d never travelled on it the other way though; there had never been the need.

She well remembered the day Mary left, beside herself with excitement. She’d been mad to go with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Sam, who’d wanted to take her back for a wee holiday to their house in Birmingham, and she hadn’t been at all sure that her mother would allow it. Bridie had been sorry to see her sister go and would have been worse still if she’d known she’d never come back to live at the farm again.

She wondered if her mother had had an inkling of the way it might turn out, for she’d not wanted Mary to go either and Bridie had overheard the conversation she had about it with her sister Ellen. ‘What is the point of going to a place like Birmingham for a holiday?’ Sarah had complained. ‘Haven’t you said it’s fine and dirty and the air full of smoke and fumes from the factories? Hasn’t Mary all she needs here for a holiday if she wants one?’

‘Aye, and what does she see of it?’ Ellen retorted. ‘Cooped up all day in a shirt factory.’

‘It was her choice to work there,’ Sarah said, bridling at the implied criticism.

‘I wasn’t blaming you, Sarah,’ Ellen said in a conciliatory tone. ‘But let me take the girl for a wee change. Show her things and take her places you haven’t here. I’d like to do it, Sarah. You know I think of your children almost as my own.’

Sarah could say nothing after that. The blight on Ellen’s life was the fact that she and Sam had never had any children. Ellen, older than Sarah by five years, had lived with Sam’s parents in Letterkenny for six years after her marriage and initially put the fact that she was childless down to the stress of living with in-laws she barely got on with, certain it would come right when she and Sam had a place of their own.

She’d seen and approved her sister’s marriage to Jimmy McCarthy, and only had a slight twinge of envy at the birth of Seamus the following year and Johnnie the year after. Shortly after this, she followed her husband to Birmingham, where an uncle promised him a job in a new rubber factory set up by an Irishman named Byrne, later called Dunlop’s.

Ellen had been glad to go, for Sam’s father’s farm made little enough money and Sam, being the second son, would never inherit it anyway. At first, all they could find to rent were two mean little rooms and Ellen was actually glad she hadn’t weans to see to in the place and said as much to any who asked her.

She’d been married almost ten years when they got the house on Bell Barn Road and she settled down to life there. She was confident children would be part of their marriage and, please God, children she could rear, not like her poor sister Sarah, who’d lost three wee babies to consumption.

But no children came. Ellen had a comfortable home – Sam earned good money, though he worked hard for it and came back home each evening as black as any miner and stinking from the rubber, and he was a good man, a good husband and provider and, Ellen thought, would have made a wonderful father. But it wasn’t to be. ‘What can’t be cured must be endured,’ she told Sarah, when she had eventually come to terms with her barren state. She visited her sister and her children at least once a year, sometimes twice, and all of them loved her and Sam dearly.

Sarah had never resented the love her children had for her sister and her husband, for didn’t she love them herself and felt heartsore that they hadn’t been blessed with children? She was quite willing to share hers. Ellen had never suggested taking any away before though and Sarah had serious misgivings. But then, she told herself, she had Mary all the time, and Terry and young Bridie too. Surely she couldn’t be selfish enough to begrudge her sister a week or two of her daughter’s company?

‘Sure don’t I know you love my weans?’ she told her sister. ‘And it’s bad of me to deny you Mary’s company. It isn’t as if she’s not due for a holiday from the shirt factory either. I’d say she was more than entitled. So you take her along with you and Sam and Godspeed to all of you.’

Bridie knew then that Mary would go and that she’d miss her desperately. As it was she’d hugged and kissed her that early morning as the family all assembled at the end of the farm where the rail bus would obligingly stop to take Ellen, Sam and Mary on their journey.

As it had pulled up beside them, Mary had peeled herself away from her weeping sister, who was wrapped around her, and had turned to embrace her parents. Ellen had taken Bridie in her arms. ‘She’ll be back before you know it,’ she promised. Bridie had tried to swallow the sobs and nod to Ellen. She couldn’t blame her aunt, she loved her too much and anyway she’d heard her mammy say often how hard it was not to have a chick or child belonging to her.

After the rail bus had left the farm and Bridie’s parents and Terry returned to the farmhouse, Bridie had climbed up on the five-barred gate as she’d often done with Rosalyn and watched the rail bus chug its way to Derg Bridge Halt, the next station.

From this height, as long as the sun shone, and no mist shrouded the hills you could often see the glint of the tracks disappearing between the two towering peaks in the distance known as Barnes Gap.

Her uncle Francis, Rosalyn’s father, would keep them all entertained on winter evenings with tales of the highwaymen who used to lurk there in the past and prey on the unsuspecting people travelling along the road.

Francis was a gifted storyteller and he could paint a grand picture in words, and Bridie gave a smile at her own foolishness as she remembered how feared she used to be. Today Barnes Gap was a famous landmark where only sheep, not highwaymen, wandered at will.

The sun had turned the rivers running down the mountainsides into silver snakes and a tributary of one of those rivers ran beside the farm. Bridie could see it in the distance and she remembered playing in there as a child and how the boys had learned to swim where it ran deeper behind the rocky waterfall. She gave a sigh of pleasure at the memory as she turned to face her cousin. ‘I’d never want to leave here, Rosalyn. I love it all. What more could you want? It’s beautiful!’

‘Aye. Beautiful and dull, deadly dull,’ Rosalyn replied contemptuously. ‘But you at least can get away from it. If Mary’s place doesn’t take your fancy, haven’t you two fine brothers in New York?’

Bridie knew she had. They were shadowy figures she could barely remember, who sent weekly letters to her mother Sarah with dollars folded inside them.

‘I can’t remember either Seamus or Johnnie,’ Bridie protested. ‘I was only five when they left in 1919, and before that they’d been at the Great War for three years.’

Rosalyn, a year older than Bridie, remembered how happy everyone was that Bridie’s older brothers had escaped injury in the Great War that had killed so many and arrived home, if not totally fit and well, at least in one piece.

Their happiness was short-lived though, for in the early spring of 1919, two weeks after the boys had come home, they’d both contracted Spanish flu.

Bridie had crept about the house of sickness on tiptoe, listening to the adults talk. She didn’t understand much of it, but knew her brothers were very sick, and with the rest of her family she’d said prayers and attended Masses though she barely knew them.

The two boys had rallied and began on the long road to full recovery when, despite Sarah’s efforts to isolate them during their illness, their young brother and sister, Robert and Nuala, then aged seven and nine, caught the flu too. Sarah was worried, but she told herself that the children had previously been fit and healthy, and they’d surely have more resistance than their brothers who’d spent years fighting a war from an open trench they’d shared with ice and mud and rats. However, Sarah had underestimated the speed with which the illness could take hold. Neither Sarah’s stringent nursing care, the masses said, novenas begun nor rosaries recited in many neighbouring houses could save the young children who died just two weeks after the onset of the disease.

Bridie had been beside herself with grief, unable to understand how children fit and healthy one day could just up and die in no time at all. Robert and Nuala, the siblings nearest to Bridie’s age, had been her playmates, together with Rosalyn and her brother Frank, and Bridie missed them dreadfully. Rosalyn had been almost as badly affected and they’d often crept away together to escape the grief.

It was usually Mary who found and comforted the two wee girls. Sarah and Jimmy were too racked with sadness, Johnnie and Seamus were riven with guilt from bringing the disease into the family, and Terry was busy trying to keep everything ticking over, although he was stunned with sorrow himself.

Then, with the family coming to terms with their loss, Seamus and Johnnie, unable to stand the guilt any longer, suggested going to their uncle Connor in New York in the autumn of 1919. Ireland was on the brink of civil war at the time and Bridie remembered her mother saying the boys had survived the war, as well as pulled round from the Spanish flu, and she didn’t want a British Tommy gun to end their lives and so she’d made no objection to them going and trying their luck in America.

Although Bridie barely remembered the two brothers she still got that blood was thicker than water when all was said and done and a brother was a brother. ‘I’m sure they’d be delighted if you were to join them,’ Rosalyn told Bridie. ‘They’d hardly refuse now, would they?’

‘Probably not,’ Bridie said, considering it. ‘But I don’t think I’d like America, not from what they say in their letters anyway. I’m not like you, Rosalyn, I’m happy here and Mammy and Daddy would hate me to leave.’

Rosalyn knew that was true. Bridie had been pampered all her life, being the baby of the family. After the deaths of Robert and Nuala, Sarah had taken even greater care of her youngest child. She was slight, very small, and Sarah thought she hadn’t the constitution or physique of the children she had left to rear.

She appeared incredibly frail, yet Bridie never sickened for anything. After Robert and Nuala died, Sarah worried constantly about her. The choicest cuts of meat were hers and there was always a newly laid egg and fresh milk whenever she wanted it. She was expected to do little in the house: Sarah said she did enough at school and encouraged her to go out into the sunshine, or sit by the fire to rest herself.

Rosalyn often resented the way Bridie was treated. Apart from her elder brother Frank, there were also four much younger weans at home: her mother had suffered a series of miscarriages after her birth and so she’d been eight when Declan was born, followed by Nora, Connie and Martin. She seldom had a minute to call her own and yet Bridie could swan around the place, being petted by everyone because she looked so sweet.

And she did, that was the very devil of it. She was elfin-looking with large, expressive, deepbrown eyes, ringed with long black lashes, which showed up against her creamy-coloured skin, and just a hint of pink dusted across her cheeks. Her nose was like a little button, and her mouth a perfect rosebud above a slightly pointed chin that showed how stubborn she could be at times, not that she was thwarted in many things she wanted. Bridie’s shining glory though was her hair. It was thick, the colour of deep mahogany, and hung in natural waves which were tied back with a ribbon, curling tendrils escaping and framing her pretty little face.

She was well loved, Bridie. Her parents were fair besotted by her and seemed to find it amazing that they had given life to this beautiful, fine-boned child and Mary and Terry petted and spoilt her too. She was also a favourite in Rosalyn’s own home and even Frank was gentle with her.

Yes, Bridie had a fine life, Rosalyn thought. Why ever would she want to leave? Yet a restlessness had begun to stir in Rosalyn and she knew Barnes More, which was just three miles away from Donegal Town in neighbouring Northern Ireland, would not be able to hold her for long. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I intend to go as soon as the opportunity arises. Mammy’s brother Aiden keeps talking about trying his luck in the States, but he hasn’t done anything about it yet. He’s sweet on Maria Flanagan and that’s what holding him, Mammy says. I don’t intend to get sweet on anyone over here. There are men galore in America. I’ll chance my arm there.’

‘It’s not your arm they’ll be looking at I’m thinking,’ Bridie said with a broad grin.

‘Bridie McCarthy,’ Rosalyn shrieked in mock indignation. ‘I’ll …’

But Bridie never found out what Rosalyn was going to say because just at that moment they heard Aunt Delia’s voice in the yard. ‘Rosalyn! You, Rosalyn!’

‘Oh, Dear God, now I’ll catch it,’ Rosalyn said with a groan, catching sight of her mother’s angry stance from the barn window as she stood in the yard below them.

Bridie watched her cousin run across the yard to her mother, feeling sorry for her. She had hardly any time to herself. Once, Bridie had asked her mother whether she thought her aunt Delia was unfair on Rosalyn.

‘Well, she has her hands full with four wee ones and all,’ Sarah had said. ‘And,’ she’d added, ‘Francis isn’t always easy. ’Course, your father won’t hear a word said against him.’

Bridie was familiar with the story of how her father Jimmy and his wee brother Francis were the only ones left after cholera had swept through their family. Female relations had arrived in droves to claim wee Francis who was but five. Jimmy had been twenty years old then and refused to let him go. Instead, he had farmed the land and reared the boy himself.

Jimmy had married Sarah when she was just seventeen and she helped in the rearing of Francis, who was by then twelve years old. Later, as a grown man, he had met and married Delia and Jimmy had helped him buy the farm beside them when it became vacant. Because of all this there was a special feeling between the brothers, though they were totally different both in looks and temperament, and the families saw a good deal of one another.

‘What’s wrong with Uncle Francis?’ Bridie had asked, intrigued, for she thought her uncle grand, full of fun and wit and always ready for a wee game or a laugh.

Sarah had given a sniff and with that sniff and from the look she also threw her, Bridie knew she was wasting her time asking. ‘Never you mind, Miss,’ Sarah had snapped. ‘Delia has her work cut out, that’s all I’m saying.’

Doesn’t need to take it all out on Rosalyn, Bridie thought now as she watched Rosalyn trailing behind her mother across the orchard that separated their house from her aunt and uncle’s. Rosalyn had her head down and Bridie guessed she was crying.

She wondered if she should have written and asked Mary if Rosalyn could come with her to Birmingham. But she really wanted Mary to herself. She doubted that Rosalyn would be let come anyway. How would her mother manage without her? Then there was the job she was starting soon in the shirt factory in town. She would be beginning that before Bridie had to go back to school.

At one point it seemed that even Bridie wouldn’t be able to go because Sarah didn’t want her travelling alone. Normally, Ellen would have come over like a shot to take her back, but she was struck down in bed with a bad attack of rheumatics and couldn’t make the trip.

But Bridie was desperate to go and when Terry offered to go with her as far as the boat and meet her from it on her return, Sarah reluctantly agreed. Bridie had grown very fond of Terry who’d been friendlier to her since Mary had left, knowing how much Bridie would miss her. Now the two got along well, even though Terry was seven years older than her.

Despite Bridie’s spirited claim that she could look after herself, she was glad Terry was beside her to negotiate rail buses and trains, especially when she saw the big port of Belfast where the ferry was waiting. Bridie suddenly wished Terry was coming all the way with her. Terry wished that too when he saw Bridie hanging over the deck rail, the case hurriedly borrowed from their uncle Francis beside her nearly as big as she was.

For two pins he’d have hopped up there with her and hang the consequences. He was at any rate heartily sick of the farm. But he knew he couldn’t do that to his father, not just leave him in the lurch that way. So he waved goodbye to his little sister as the boat set sail and hoped she’d remember what he’d said about changing trains at a place called Crewe.

However, Bridie had the vulnerable appearance of someone who needed looking after and, in a boat packed with Irish families, she was befriended by many a mothering soul. They were a great comfort when she felt a little sick and a true help when it was time to disembark. Someone eventually settled her onto a train bound for Crewe and, once on the train, Bridie again found that people were only too happy to assist a wee girl travelling alone and there was someone to carry her case and direct her to the right train for Birmingham. Bridie knew without all those kind people she would have been utterly lost.

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.’