Читать книгу Anne Bennett 3-Book Collection: A Sister’s Promise, A Daughter’s Secret, A Mother’s Spirit - Anne Bennett - Страница 20

Molly took Nellie’s words to heart and they helped her cope in the days that followed and the next Sunday she was able to talk of it with just a hint of Sadness.

‘We used to make a big thing of birthdays,’ Molly told Nellie and Cathy the following Sunday afternoon. ‘On Dad’s birthday, the year before Mom was sick, we went to the Alex Theatre in Birmingham to see a variety show. Kevin didn’t go because he was too young, so Granddad looked after him and it was just me and my parents, and there was a man called Max Wall as the star of the show. What a comedian!

‘I remember laughing so hard my stomach ached and then to put the tin hat on it, though we’d had this party tea and all before we left the house, we bought fish and chips on the way home and ate them out of the paper. It was the perfect end to the perfect day, and nothing can ever erase my memory of that. What hurts me a bit is that Kevin won’t have many memories at all. I mean, what can you really remember clearly from when you were five?’

‘Not a lot,’ Cathy and Nellie admitted.

‘Sometimes I think because he was so young, eventually he will probably forget what our parents looked like,’ Molly said.

‘It must be terribly hard for him right enough,’ Nellie said with sympathy, ‘and I often think it was wrong to part you. You really needed each other and please God you will be together soon.’

‘There is still a part of me, like a nagging tooth, that asks why?’ Molly said. ‘That was the question Kevin asked the priest on the day of the funeral. But of course he didn’t know either. I think Kevin thought he had a sort of hotline to God and could come up with a host of reasons why He needed our parents more than we did at that time.’

‘I really understand your bewilderment,’ Nellie said. ‘And I haven’t any answers to give you either. It was a dreadful and terribly tragic accident. To be honest, there are many things in the world that I don’t understand, but I have to live life the way it is.’

‘I do see what you mean,’ Molly said. ‘And you are right. We all hear of horrible things happening to people every day of the week. And now that this has happened to me, and I can do nothing to change it, the only way to deal with it is to go on, look forward and live my life as my parents would want me to.’

Both Nellie and Cathy were astounded by Molly’s stoicism and courage. Nellie gave her hands a squeeze as she said gently, ‘Well done, my dear. Now, how about tea and cake all round?’

‘I’d say about time too,’ Jack said, coming into the room at that moment. He had a large grin plastered to his face as he went on, ‘And be quick about it too, woman. Tom will be here soon and we don’t want the Guinness spoiling.’

‘Don’t you “woman” me, Jack McEvoy,’ Nellie said in mock indignation, though she got to her feet as she spoke. ‘And as for the Guinness spoiling, you never leave it in the glass long enough to spoil. And I wasn’t talking to you, anyway. It was Cathy and Molly I was speaking to.’

Cathy raised her eyes to the ceiling, and Molly bit her lip to prevent a laugh escaping as they heard Jack’s indignant voice as he followed his wife out of the room, protesting, ‘Well, I like that, not talking to me, not considering me at all and me the head of the house …’

Molly felt a surge of happiness that she could count on this family, who were so at one with one another, as her friends. She said, ‘I do think your parents are lovely.’

Cathy pretended to consider this and then said with a grin, ‘They’re not so bad, as parents go. I think I have done quite a good job of knocking them into shape.’

Molly laughed. ‘I wonder what your mother would say about that, Cathy. Maybe we should ask her. Isn’t that her voice calling us now?’

Cathy left school that summer and began work in the shop full time. To mark the occasion, Nellie bought her new clothes, including a couple of brassieres to accommodate her quite large and pendulous breasts. Molly was so envious of the brassieres that Cathy showed her the Sunday after they were bought, but even more envious of the size of Cathy’s breasts, which would fit in them, for hers were small in comparison.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Cathy said, when Molly said this. ‘Anyway, with your build wouldn’t large breasts look a bit stupid?’

‘I suppose,’ Molly agreed, for she was very fine-boned.

‘They are not much use to me either,’ Cathy went on. ‘I mean, think about it. Look at the figure you have, and the skin and hair I would die for. It isn’t as if I can take out my breasts for everyone to have a look and remark on how big they are, is it?’ And then there was a slight pause before she said, ‘Not just yet a while, anyway.’

‘Cathy!’

‘Why are you so shocked?’ Cathy said. ‘Someone will be entitled to take a look at them one day. And,’ she added with an impish grin, ‘more than a look if I know anything.’

‘Do you ever think about things like that?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘I asked first.’

‘Well, course I do,’ Cathy said. ‘It’s natural, isn’t it, to wonder?’

‘You don’t think it’s a sin?’

‘How could it be?’ Cathy said. ‘The priests would probably say it was but, God, don’t they see sin everywhere? If you got out of bed one morning and blew your nose, they would find probably find some sin in there somewhere.’

‘So you don’t confess it?’

‘I do not,’ Cathy said emphatically. ‘And you won’t either if you have any sense. What Mammy told us last month, did you think that a sin?’

‘No,’ Molly said definitely. ‘Anything but, and less than a fortnight later, I was more than grateful.’

Seeing the girls developing into young women, Nellie had taken them aside and explained about periods, and just a scant two weeks later Molly started. She knew without Nellie she would have thought she was dying. As it was, she had been able to go into the farmhouse without any fuss, and ask her grandmother did she have any cotton pads for she had started her periods.

If her grandmother was surprised by her calmness, she made no comment about it. All she did growl out as she passed her the pads was, ‘Period or not, there is to be no slacking. It happens to every woman every month and so there is no need to make a song and dance about it. Fill yourself a bucket of water to leave in your room to soak the used ones in and that should be all there is to it.’

Molly did as her grandmother told her and despite the messiness and the griping pains in her stomach, she welcomed her periods for they meant she was growing up, one step nearer to the time when she could leave this place.

The letters from Birmingham brought Molly up to date with things going on in the world beyond her narrow existence, like the civil war that had begun in Spain in the summer of that year, though Molly couldn’t see why Tom was so concerned about it.

‘But, Uncle Tom, Spain is miles away from us, and haven’t there always been little wars or rumours of wars happening in these types of countries?’ she said, as they walked side by side one bright and pleasant Sunday afternoon.

‘I have a very uneasy feeling about it, that’s all.’

‘But why?’

‘Molly,’ Tom asked, ‘have you ever stood dominoes in such a way that when you push the first one it knocks into the next and so on, until they all topple over?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Molly said. ‘I used to spend hours doing that for Kevin.’

‘Well, I can’t help feeling that what is happening in Spain is the first domino,’ Tom said. ‘Only time will tell if I am right.’

Molly, though, thought he was just being an old worry guts. She was more concerned with the Olympic Games in Berlin that summer, which she read all about in the papers at the McEvoys’. She was incensed by the fact that Hitler would not honour the black American athlete who beat all before him and, as Tom said, the action showed the whole world just how racist Hitler’s government was.

There were other things in the paper closer to home too, like the poverty in England, which even the Irish papers occasionally reported on.

‘Granddad says it’s as bad as ever,’ Molly said. ‘It was bad when I left but I sort of hoped it would have begun getting better by now and not just go on year after year. Granddad said if something isn’t done soon, he can just see the unemployed taking matters into their own hands and Hilda says more or less the same.’

It seemed there were many around who thought that, though, for by the time the harvest was completed and all stacked away for the winter, there came news of two hundred men walking from Jarrow in the North-East, where unemployment was nearly seventy per cent to bring their plight to the government in London.

The gesture captured the imagination of Ireland too, and there were many pictures in the papers of the weary marchers with thin, wasted faces, walking behind their battered bus containing all their provisions and cooking facilities rolling along beside them. Some towns and villages welcomed them and they were brought into church halls and fed, while other places were barred to them.

‘Afraid of riots amongst their own townsfolk, I imagine,’ Jack said at the tea table after scrutinising the paper. ‘Mind,’ he added, ‘it is one hell of a way to travel on empty stomachs.’

It was. Molly hadn’t been that sure where Jarrow was and Jack had shown both her and Cathy on a map. It was one hell of a way to travel, whichever way you looked at it, whether your stomach was full or not, Molly thought. It was gratifying to read that in the towns where the men were officially barred from entering, often church organisations and even ordinary people took on the task of feeding them.

‘My mother would do something like that,’ Molly said. ‘She bought pies for our dinner one day in the Bull Ring and then gave them away to this barefoot woman and her clutch of children. She said that the woman was so, so grateful, like as if she had given her the crown jewels. We had to have bread and dripping that day and she said we had to be grateful for that, for those children looked as if in all their short lives they had never had full stomachs.’

‘Point is, though,’ Jack said, ‘it shouldn’t have to happen that way. There should be jobs for the people. Seems to me Ireland wasn’t the only one let down after the Great War. And there is no good this chap Mosley trying to blame it all on the Jews, and inciting people to rise up against them.’

In the end, though, the Jarrow March was all for nothing, for the Prime Minister refused to see or speak with the men and, defeated and demoralised, they had no option but to return home with the situation unresolved. It seemed the last straw when King Edward abdicated, because the nation would not accept the American divorcee he had taken up with as their queen.

‘Deserting the sinking ship or what?’ Tom asked as they made their way to the McEvoys, the Sunday following this announcement on 11 December.

‘I think it’s what,’ Molly said. ‘Our old neighbour never liked him much. She thought the fact that he was handsome was the only thing he had in his favour, and that could be a handicap in a way, because if he was as ugly as sin, King or no King, I don’t reckon old Wallis would have looked the side he was on.’

‘You could be right,’ Tom said with a grin.

‘Anyway, it may be just as well,’ Molly said. ‘My granddad has been worried about Edward as King for ages because he says he’s too keen on Germany and the German government. And with all we hear about them all the time, isn’t that the last nation in the world you would like to be on friendly terms with?’

‘I would say so.’

‘And so would I,’ Molly said, then added, ‘This has been an unsettled year one way and another, hasn’t it?’

‘Aye,’ Tom said in agreement. ‘Let’s hope 1937 will be better.’

Molly thought it just might be when, for her fifteenth birthday, her grandfather sent her a silver locket. When she carefully opened it, she found a photograph of her mother one side of it and her father the other. Her granddad couldn’t have sent anything that could have pleased her more, and she placed it around her neck immediately, knowing she would never remove it, that she would wear her mother and father next to her heart, which was their rightful place, but beneath her clothes lest her grandmother see.

There had been little snow in the winter of 1936/7 and few truly gale-force winds, but the frost had been a hard one and the days bone-chillingly cold. Molly wasn’t the only one to feel glad when the warmth of spring began stealing into the days. It matched her more optimistic outlook. She had good friends, the support of her uncle, her savings were building up and her letters kept her in touch with what family she had.

The 19 April was a Monday that year and, mindful of Nellie’s words the previous year, Molly did not allow herself to dwell on the events of that dreadful day two years before. It was a beautiful day anyway. The sun shone from a sky of cornflower blue and Molly felt almost happy as she hung the washing on the line, knowing it would be dry in no time and she could have it all ironed and put away before the day was out.

The following week, Tom had to go into Buncrana and when he came back he told them of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica. Jack had saved the papers for Tom to see for himself.

‘German planes were used,’ Tom said, ‘and hundreds were killed, because it was market day and all, and no warning of any sort.’

‘I am sorry, really sorry about all the people dying,’ Molly said later as they milked the cows together, ‘but it can’t have anything to do with us here, or England either, can it?’

‘It might,’ Tom said. ‘I imagine it was Hitler’s way of showing the world what he is capable of.’

‘Right, so now the world knows,’ Molly said. ‘But it was directed against the poor people of Spain, not us.’

Tom opened his mouth, but said nothing more. Molly was not ready yet to hear of his concerns. If he was right and he hoped to God he wasn’t, then before too long there would be plenty to worry about. What was the point of meeting trouble halfway?

Anyway, Molly told herself as the year rolled on, she was right not to fret over Spain. Britain and Ireland were islands and safe, surely. England had a new King on the throne too, for Edward’s brother had been crowned George VI. Her granddad had said in his letters that the celebrations had been muted somewhat because of the scandal surrounding Edward’s abdication. Anyway, whoever was on the throne was ruling over a country that had its own severe problems, and in Molly’s opinion the war to put an end to poverty was a far better battle to fight.

In January 1938, Biddy had news of her son Joe, from America. His mother-in-law had finally died and as soon as arrangements were finalised, Joe would be leaving.

‘Is he coming here?’ Molly asked Tom that evening as they milked the cows.

Tom smiled and shook his head. ‘Joe left here with big ideas. Told everyone he was off to the New World to make a fortune, that he would come back with gold dripping from his fingers, and he can’t face coming back here with his tail between his legs.’

‘So what is he going to do?’

‘He intends making for England as soon as he can, only the winter is not the best time to be travelling the Atlantic. He is looking to the spring to sail. I offered to send him the fare, for I know things have been tough for some time and the funeral must have been expensive, but he said he has some pride left. Gloria intends selling her mother’s rings to raise the money, apparently. Hers have already gone the same way to keep them alive this far. Anyway, he has a job of sorts now that keeps them just about surviving until they are ready to leave.’

‘What will he do in England?’

‘Anything he can turn his hand to,’ Tom said. ‘One thing neither myself nor Joe is afraid of is hard work. Once he is in England, I shall cease worrying so much about him.’

Biddy didn’t see it that way, of course. ‘Going to England is madness!’ she declared. ‘Why England, when he has a place ready and waiting for him here? He belongs here. They can have Molly’s room and she can sleep in the barn.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Molly commented sarcastically.

‘And it is more, far more, than you deserve,’ Biddy snapped. ‘Write and tell him, Tom.’

‘I will do no such thing, Mammy,’ Tom said. ‘Joe is a grown man and knows he can come back here and welcome at any time, and without relegating Molly to the barn either. But he has made the decision to make for England.’

‘I might have known I couldn’t count on you,’ Biddy snarled. ‘I will write to him myself and demand he comes here. I haven’t seen him in years and I am getting no younger. Joe will be home before long, mark my words.’

‘Will he, do you think?’ Molly asked Tom later.

He shook his head. ‘I doubt it, unless his character is changed totally. I told you, he never leaped to do Mammy’s bidding like muggins here did.’

Joe and his family arrived in England in early March where they found lodgings in Tottenham in London, and Joe soon got a job in the docks.

Biddy, of course, blamed Gloria for Joe’s staying away. ‘Thinks we are not good enough, that’s what it is,’ she said. ‘Don’t know why he had to take up with a Yankee trollop in the first place.’

‘She is Joe’s choice,’ Tom said quietly, ‘and that is good enough for me.’

But not apparently for Biddy. Watching her, Molly gave a shiver of apprehension for the unknown American woman. She knew Biddy would always blame her for their decision to stay in England, and the longer time passed, the greater her bitterness would be. She sincerely hoped the two never got to meet.

As Molly passed her sixteenth birthday, she remembered the promise she had made to Kevin that she come back when she was sixteen, but as the time drew near she was hesitant to do this. Part of the reason was money, for although Paul Simmons had been more than generous, and a postal order had come every week, most of which she deposited in the post office, she knew she would be in need of a fair bit when she set off back to Birmingham. There were the fares, for one thing, and perhaps lodgings and money enough to keep her until she got a job, because there was no way that she was going to live off her granddad.

Then Nellie told her that she thought Biddy might well have the right to bring her back if she was under the age of eighteen. ‘I mean, she will hardly agree to you going back and consorting with the people she sees as heathens,’ she said to Molly.

Molly gave a wry smile. ‘I wasn’t thinking of telling her, Nellie,’ she said. ‘I was going to slip away without a word. I know she wouldn’t agree to it, and not just for the religious aspect of it either. She has had me skivvying in that house and farm since the day I arrived. When I do leave here and she has to do some of these things herself she is going to have one almighty shock.’

‘So,’ Nellie said, ‘wouldn’t it be better to put off leaving for a while until you are older and she will have no more jurisdiction over you? She could easily get the police to help her trace a runaway, especially a girl. When you leave here, you don’t want to think that that old besom has any sort of right at all to haul you back again.’

And wouldn’t she make me suffer for that act of defiance if she did? Molly thought, and a shiver ran through her. ‘It would give me a chance to save more,’ she conceded. ‘But … well, eighteen is another two years away and there is that promise I made to Kevin.’

‘You didn’t know the set-up of the place when you made that promise, Molly,’ Nellie reminded her. ‘Nor just how bad your grandmother could be. Write to the child and give him some reason why you can’t come just yet.’

Knowing that Nellie spoke good sense, Molly wrote to her brother that very night, but because she had never told them in Birmingham how bad her grandmother was, she just said she hadn’t enough money saved to leave Ireland yet, but she would be with him as soon as she possibly could. That night, she lay in bed and went over the letter in her mind, knowing she had made the right decision.

One of the first things she had to do when she left this place was buy new clothes, for she had grown out of those she had brought with her. She now had definite breasts developing, though she would never have the figure of the more voluptuous Cathy. This, together with the muscles in her back, which had been strengthened by the work on the farm, had made her dresses for Mass very tight, and her coat she struggled to fasten at all. She had also grown taller, so that the dresses she had brought with her three years before were several inches above her knee and she could barely walk in her shoes that pinched her feet so badly.

Eventually and begrudgingly, Biddy declared she needed new clothes. Molly was as pleased as any other young girl at the thought of new things and she thanked her grandmother, not something she was wont to do often. It was as she saw her grandmother’s lips curl as if in amusement that she felt the first tingling of apprehension.

Buncrana was well served with dress shops, but Biddy marched past them all and instead took Molly into the drapers. Molly’s heart sank when Biddy selected cloth in the dullest of grey and navy blue for the dressmaker to make up into two dresses for Molly. She didn’t hear what was discussed, for she was sent outside the shop after the dressmaker had measured her, so she didn’t see the dressmaker trying to remonstrate with Biddy and try to change her mind.

‘After all, I have a reputation to keep up,’ she told Nellie later. ‘What that woman wants me to do is not something I approve of at all, at all. She wants no decoration, not even shiny buttons, or a collar and cuff of a contrasting colour. And what in God’s name is the point of it? It’s like throwing some old bag over a beautiful flower. I tell you, Nellie, I thought of refusing to make the dresses at all, but,’ and here she gave a shrug, ‘times are tough. I can’t really afford to turn business away.’

The following week, when Molly saw the dresses, her heart sank. There was no adornment of any sort about them and they went right up to the neck and down to the wrist and ended halfway down her calf.

‘Ah God, Nellie, if you could have seen the look in that poor girl’s eyes when she looked at herself in the mirror,’ the dressmaker said to Nellie afterwards. ‘And the grandmother enjoying it, so she was.’

‘Yes,’ Nellie said with a grimace. ‘She would be.’

In fact, Biddy was far from finished. She bought Molly a couple of liberty bodices too. Molly had worn these before as a child for extra warmth in the winter, but they were nothing like these ones, which pressed her breasts down uncomfortably and had suspenders attached to them. Biddy bought thick black stockings to attach to them and voluminous knickers.

‘Take that look off your face, girl,’ Biddy said, as they left the shop. ‘This is what you are getting. Like it or lump it, it makes no odds to me. Now for the coat and boots.’

The boots were second-hand, a pair the cobbler had left on his hands after repairing them. ‘They are more a boy’s boot than a girl’s,’ he told Biddy doubtfully.

‘A boot’s a boot, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but these are hobnailed to make them hard-wearing. That’s why the mothers buy them for the boys.’

‘They look just fine to me,’ Biddy said. She turned to Molly and said, ‘Try them on. If they fit you, we will take them.’

Molly thought of the ugly clothes and the ugly underwear and now the ugly boots, and she wanted to weep, especially when she remembered the pretty clothes her mother had bought her, which she took such pleasure in wearing, and the patent shoes that she could almost see her face in.

However, she knew her grandmother was already enjoying her discomfort and would be delighted to see tears. She would not give her that satisfaction. She lifted her head at this resolve. The movement was barely perceptible, but Biddy spotted it and it enraged her. By God, she thought, I will knock that pride out of her if it is the last thing I do. The shabby black coat she bought in the second-hand shop was one the proprietor thought he would never get rid of. It was far too big for Molly too, and so long she knew it would reach the top of her boots, but Biddy told him to wrap it up, they would take it.

The next morning, Tom could hardly believe her eyes when Molly came out of her room dressed in her new clothes for Mass. He understood now why she hadn’t been excited at getting new things like Nuala had always been. She would be showing him this and that in the cart even, and once home insist on putting the new things on and parading in front of them all, his mother looking on dotingly at her darling child.

His eyes slid to his mother’s now and he saw the gleam of satisfaction there. He thought her a malicious old cow and he knew the best thing to do was not to mention the clothes at all.

So he smiled at Molly and said, ‘You ready then?’

Molly was grateful to Tom and when she got to the church no one commented either, but Molly couldn’t altogether ignore the looks of pity that were shot her way. She didn’t want pity. It was no earthly use to anyone. She had money of her own now to buy what clothes she wanted. The five shillings had grown over the two years, especially as most weeks Tom remembered to give her sixpence, which she usually saved to pay for stationery and stamps. But she would not touch a penny piece of that money. It was to be her gateway to freedom, when she would be able to dress in any way she chose.

Just after they had news of Joe’s safe arrival in England, Molly heard of Germany’s invasion of Austria.

‘Uncle Tom, you don’t just march into another person’s country and take it over,’ Molly said as they walked home from the McEvoys’ one Sunday evening.

‘Well, that’s what Hitler did all right.’

‘And they just let him?’

‘That’s about the strength of it,’ Tom said. ‘Course, he was Austrian by birth. That’s maybe why. Anyway, they say without a shot fired he is now in charge of Austria. They call it the Anschluss. It means joining up, I suppose, like a merger.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Molly said. ‘I mean, why did he want Austria? Isn’t Germany enough for him?’

‘Ah, Molly! If it was just Austria.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I think this is the tip of a very big iceberg.’

‘But it doesn’t have to be,’ Molly said. ‘If Hitler wants Austria for some reason, and Austria doesn’t mind, then let him have the damned place if it matters much to him.’

‘I think, Molly, that that is what the world will be forced to do,’ said Tom.

Then in late September of that same year the Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, had gone to see Hitler in Munich and worked out a deal, and there was a picture of him on the front pages of the paper waving the piece of paper and declaring, ‘I believe it is peace for our time.’

Molly, as usual, followed the news stories at Cathy’s house. ‘That’s good news, at any rate,’ she said.

‘Um, I suppose,’ Cathy replied.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well, it’s just that Daddy said that Chamberlain had to give Hitler a piece of Czechoslovakia to get him to agree.’

Molly pondered this for a moment and then she said, ‘Well, I don’t see that that is right. I know what problems there are taking away part of a country, and Ireland knows that maybe better than many. I also don’t see what gave Britain the authority to take land from one country and give it to another just because they wanted it, and I have no idea how the Czechoslovakian government or its people feel about it either. But I can’t help feeling if the alternative was war they would probably agree anyway.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ Cathy said. ‘It is what anyone with any sense would want. Anyway, I’m grateful that all the fretting and anxiety is out of the way. Maybe now everyone can stop going around with doleful faces.’

‘Oh God, Cathy,’ Molly cried with a smile, ‘do you really think that is likely? It is adults we are talking about here, and the age of miracles is past long ago.’

‘Cathy says her father thinks Chamberlain a fool,’ Molly told her uncle one Sunday evening in early February 1939, as they walked home from the McEvoys’.

‘He does,’ Tom said, ‘and so do I if he actually trusts Hitler and believes that bit of paper he was shaking so importantly has any credence at all. I don’t want a war, Molly – no one in their right mind would – but somehow we seem to be balanced on a knife-edge, like we are waiting for something.’

They hadn’t long to wait, because the following month, though the Spanish Civil War eventually drew to a close, the dictator Franco was the victor and the leader of the country, and that same month Hitler’s armies marched into Czechoslovakia.

In May, Joe wrote to tell them of the Territorial Army recalled and mobilised, and the call-up begun of young men of twenty and twenty-one years. For the first time, Molly faced the fact that Britain at least was walking the path to war, and she wrote an impassioned letter to her grandfather and Hilda, telling them to look after themselves and keep safe at all costs.

Stan, probably thinking to reassure his granddaughter, told her of the corrugated iron shelters that would be delivered to every house with a garden big enough to take them.

It will be the end of me growing my taters and my onions, at least for now, because we will have to dig a big pit to put it in. Kevin will help me – you would hardly know the lad now for he is growing up fast. Anyway, when the pit is dug and the thing assembled and fitted into it, you pile earth on the top. People say if there is enough earth then you can still grow your vegetables.

So don’t you worry your little head about us, for won’t we be as safe as houses in there? If war does come, it will not be another Guernica here, so don’t fret.

It didn’t make Molly feel any better at all. The thought of her grandfather and her little brother, and possibly Hilda and her husband too, burrowing into the ground like animals, while bombs rained down on them from the sky, horrified her. Her grandfather’s reference to Guernica bought to mind the pictures she had seen of that blitzed town, the buildings reduced to piles of smoking, smouldering rubble, its many dead or dying, others dreadfully injured.

The savagery of it had shocked the world and now that same thing perhaps might be afflicted on them or those belonging to them. God, it didn’t bear thinking about.

The talk of war was everywhere and couldn’t be escaped as the spring rolled into summer. Tom told her, going home from the McEvoys one day, that not all Irishmen felt that the war should affect them or their country at all.

‘Why not?’

‘Well, you see, many feel that this is England’s fight, not theirs, and they should keep well out of it. I think they are remembering England’s promise of Home Rule as thanks for Ireland’s support in the Great War, where our brother Finn lost his life.’

Molly nodded. ‘Mom told me about that and also that the promise wasn’t kept.’

‘That’s right,’ Tom said. ‘And of course that led to years of unease and almost civil war raging through the land. People here don’t want to be dragged in again.’

‘I can see they have a point,’ Molly said. ‘How do you feel?’

‘I think the past should stay in the past,’ Tom said firmly. ‘What’s done is done, and it does no good to be rehashing it all the time. I think if Britain goes to war we could well be dragged into it whether we like it or not. And though I am essentially a man of peace, I could do my bit as well as the next man if I had to.’

‘Yeah, I think that is the best way to look at it really,’ Molly agreed.

‘But I think it would do no harm to get a wireless in,’ Tom said.

‘A wireless! Oh, Uncle Tom!’ Molly hugged herself with delight.

Tom smiled at her. ‘Joe was after advising me to get one; keep abreast of things,’ he said in explanation. ‘Seems a good enough idea to me.’

‘But how will you work it?’ Molly asked. ‘I mean, we had a wireless at home, but it ran on electric.’

‘These have something called an accumulator in the back,’ Tom said. ‘The man in the shop in Buncrana was showing me. He said it has to be charged up every so often and I can do that in Buncrana when I go in on a Saturday. Anyway, he has one on order for me and I am picking it up next Saturday.’

‘Oh, it will be grand to have a wireless,’ Molly said. ‘Ooh, I can’t wait.’

Biddy didn’t think it was grand at all. ‘Waste of more money,’ she growled out as Tom proudly carried it indoors. ‘Boy, money must burn a hole in your pocket.’

‘I am no boy,’ Tom snapped back. ‘And when I ask you to give me something towards anything I buy, then you may express an opinion. This was bought with my own hard-earned money and we have already established that what I do with that is my own business.’

Molly smiled. For her money, Tom could go for a drink every day of the week because he could always cope better with his mother when he had sunk a few pints of Guinness with Jack and the rest of the men. And anyway, she thought, nothing could take the pleasure away from actually having a wireless in the house again.