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‘And since when have the government cared about the likes of us anyway?’ Paddy said morosely. ‘Cannon fodder, the common people are.’
‘That’s about the shape of it,’ Breda said. ‘And people do what they can to survive. And now Maggie doesn’t have to make a decision this winter whether to order another hundredweight of coal or buy the makings for a dinner, and neither does Angela, so at least we have made two of those dependants happier.’
‘And that’s all we can do, I suppose.’
‘It is,’ Breda said decidedly. ‘Now come to bed and stop fretting about things you can do nothing to change.’
As Angela worked, whether it was pulling pints behind the bar or cleaning, she was always well aware of what she owed Mary, for without her stalwart help in caring for Connie, she knew their lives would have been financially harder. But she didn’t just appreciate Mary for the help she gave but she was glad she was there with them. She had been part of her life since as far back as she could remember and she hadn’t a clue how she was going to manage without her. And though Mary might have years to live yet, she somehow doubted it. The news of Barry’s death had hit her for six, combined with the death of two of her other sons in 1912 as they had travelled to America on the Titanic to seek better prospects, and the grief had done much to hasten the death of her husband. The bad times were wearing her down and Mary hadn’t the resilience of youth.
It wasn’t all bad. Mary still thought a great deal about her other two sons in America who had gone ahead some years before the Titanic disaster, and she was glad they were so happy in their new lives. She often wished she could see them again just the once, but she had known when she kissed them goodbye it was final. They wrote regularly though, and she was grateful for that, especially when they included dollar bills folded inside the letter. They wrote about things she could barely imagine, like the flashing neon lights in a place called Times Square and the trolley buses and the trains that ran underground in the bowels of the earth and the motor cars they helped build that were now filling the wide straight roads of America.
And they wrote of their marriages – for Colm had followed his brother Finbarr and married a Roman Catholic girl – and sent pictures of their weddings. But Mary could barely recognise her sons and their wives, and the babies born later were like the photographs of strangers, names on a page, and sometimes she was heart-sore knowing that she would never hold her sons’ children in her arms and take joy in them. Connie helped there, for she still had to be looked after, and Mary knew Connie loved her with a passion that eased the pain in her heart.
As Connie grew up, she became very good friends with a girl in her class called Sarah Maguire. Angela had no problem with her having Sarah as her special friend as she herself had been best friends with Maggie Malone, née Maguire, at a similar age. She was friendly with Sarah’s mother Maeve and knew them to be a respectable family and was glad to see Connie making friends of her own. It wasn’t as if she’d be all that far away in any case, for the Maguires lived just a wee bit down Bell Barn Road on the corner of Great Colmore Street.
The Maguire home was so different from Connie’s – although cramped and noisy it was filled with a vibrancy and vitality often lacking in her own. She liked them all, even Sarah’s parents. She saw little of Mr Maguire but what she saw she liked. He was called James and his eldest son, wee Jimmy, was named after him. He had big swollen muscles that often strained against the fabric of his shirts, which he usually wore folded up to the elbow so that his lower arms looked like giant hams, and led to large, red, gnarled hands. His face was equally red, with his nose sort of splashed against it and his wide, generous lips tilted upwards so it looked as if he was permanently smiling. He did smile a lot anyway and laugh, and a full-throated and very infectious laugh it was too. Added to this he had a fine head of brown hair which was sprinkled only lightly with grey.
Mrs Maguire, Maeve, had an equally dark head of hair though it was always tied away from her face in a bun of some sort. She wasn’t as pretty as Connie’s own mother – few people were – but Maeve Maguire’s face had an almost serene look seldom seen on those with a houseful of children. Connie had never heard her raise her voice and Sarah said she almost never did. So her face had a contented look about it, with no lines pulling her mouth down, although there were creases around her eyes which were a strange grey-green colour.
‘Do you mind me coming round so often?’ Connie asked her once. ‘My granny says I mustn’t annoy you.’
Mrs Maguire gave an almost tinkling laugh. ‘Child dear, you don’t annoy me in the slightest,’ she said. ‘You are like a ray of sunshine. And anyway, when you have so many, one more makes little difference and there is more company for you here. The children’s friends are always welcome and you help Sarah with the jobs she must do, so you must assure your granny you are no trouble.’
Maeve Maguire had hit the nail on the head, for Connie, though she loved her mother and grandmother dearly, was often lonely. There was something else too. Sometimes her mother seemed far away. She was there in person but when Connie spoke, she sometimes didn’t answer, didn’t seem to hear her and her eyes had a faraway look in them. She had asked her grandmother about it and Mary had said that her mother was still remembering her daddy, Barry.
‘You said that when I asked you why she was sad at Christmas.’
‘Yes. She’s remembering then too.’
‘But, Daddy didn’t die at Christmas.’
‘No, but Christmas is a time to remember loved ones, especially those you might not see again,’ Mary had said and added, ‘Don’t you feel the same when you remember your daddy?’
Connie didn’t; in fact, if she was absolutely honest, she didn’t remember her daddy at all, just the things people had told her about him. But even though she was a child she had known her granny would not like her to share those thoughts and so she contented herself by saying, ‘Mmm, I suppose.’
So she went for company to Sarah and the Maguire house. They sat together at school and met often on Saturdays and holiday times and on Sundays at Mass.
‘Beats me how you don’t run out of things to say,’ Angela commented dryly as they sat down for an early meal before she went to serve behind the bar one Saturday evening.
It was funny but they never did. They often talked about their families and one Saturday as they went along Bristol Street, fetching errands for Maeve and pushing the slumbering baby Maura in the pram, Connie suddenly said, ‘Aren’t your mammy’s eyes an unusual colour?’
‘I suppose,’ Sarah said. ‘Neither one thing or the other. Mine are the same. Look.’
‘Oh, I never noticed,’ Connie said.
‘All us girls are the same,’ Sarah said. ‘Well, that is, Kathy and Siobhan are. Too early to tell with Maura yet and the boys both look like Daddy.’
‘It must have been more noticeable with your mother because she has her hair pulled back from her face,’ Connie said. ‘But now I come to look closer you look very like your mother.’
‘Oh, the shape of my face is the same and my mouth is and thank goodness my nose is like Mammy’s too. I would hate to have a nose like my father’s, which isn’t really any shape at all. Looks like it’s been broken and not fixed properly or something. I asked him once and he said that if it had been broken he hadn’t been aware of it. Mammy said she grew up nearly beside him on the farm in Ireland and Daddy grew up with a rake of brothers, seven or eight of them with only a year between them all. There were girls too, cos there were thirteen altogether, and Mammy said near every time she saw the boys two or three of them would be scrapping on the ground like puppies. She said Daddy’s nose could have been broken a number of times and their mother wouldn’t have had time to blow her own nose, never mind notice that one of the tribe had theirs busted.’
The two girls burst out laughing. ‘Why do boys do that, fight and things?’
Sarah shrugged. ‘Who’d know the answer to that or care either? It’s just what boys do.’
‘Glad I’m a girl.’
‘And I am,’ Sarah said. ‘And it’s a blooming good job because there’s nothing to be done about it if we were unhappy. And never mind the likenesses in my family, what about yours? You look just like your mother. I’ve never seen hair so blonde and your ringlets are natural, aren’t they? I mean, you don’t have to put rags in your hair or anything.’
Connie shook her head so the ringlets held away from her face with a band swung from side to side.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They’re natural all right, it’s just that I can’t ever wear my hair loose for school. Mammy insists I have it in plaits.’
‘That’s because of the risk of nits,’ Sarah said. ‘The same reason Mammy won’t let me grow mine long. But still, you’re luckier than me because when you’re old enough you can wear your hair any way you like and you’ve got the most startling blue eyes.’
‘I know, I seem to have taken all things from my mammy and none from my daddy at all.’
‘D’you remember your daddy?’
Connie shook her head. ‘Not him, the person. Sometimes I think I do because I’ve been told so much about him, but I know what he looks like because Mammy has a picture of him in a silver frame on the sideboard. Remember I showed you? I don’t look like him at all.’
‘That’s how it is sometimes though, isn’t it?’ Sarah said.
‘Oh yes,’ Connie said as Sarah’s words tugged at her memory. ‘My mammy was born with golden locks and blue eyes like mine, my grandmother said, but she’s not my mammy’s real mother. My mammy’s real mother died in Ireland when she was a babby, like I told you before.’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said, ‘she lost the rest of her Irish family and that’s when she went to live with the McCluskys who came to England. Their son Barry was your daddy.’
Connie nodded and added, ‘And my daddy was killed in the war.’
That wasn’t uncommon and Sarah said, ‘Yes, I think lots of daddies were. But maybe your daddy and your other granny are in heaven this minute looking down on us all?’
‘I’d like to think it.’
‘Don’t say you have doubts,’ Sarah said with mock horror. ‘If you have, keep them to yourself, for if Father Brannigan hears you he will wash your mouth out with carbolic.’
Connie grinned at her friend and said, ‘When I die I shall ask God if I can pop back and tell everyone it’s true.’
Sarah laughed. ‘You are a fool, Connie. You’ll have to come back as a ghost and that will frighten everyone to death,’ she said. ‘Anyway, when were you thinking of dying?’
‘Oh, not for ages yet.’
‘Good,’ Sarah said. ‘In the meantime I think we better get on with Mammy’s shopping or she’ll think we’ve got lost. And it looks like Maura is waking up so our peace is probably gone anyway.’
TWO (#u3f88f5e8-fea6-53cd-95da-310a16346593)
Early in 1924, when Connie and Sarah were almost eleven, Sarah’s eldest sister, Kathy had left school and gone to work in the Grand Hotel in Colmore Row, Birmingham. Though she worked long hours, she loved the job and enthused about it so much that Sarah’s other elder sister, Siobhan, applied for a job there too two years later when she also left school.
Although her sisters taking live-in jobs meant that they were no longer all squashed on the one fairly small mattress in the attic, and there was more space generally and they couldn’t boss her about any more, Sarah missed them a great deal. She also knew, now that Siobhan had joined Kathy, the carefree days of her childhood were at an end, for she was the eldest girl and so she would be the one now to help her mother. She had been cushioned by the presence of two older sisters but now it was time to step up as the eldest daughter and help her mother and take a hand with her younger siblings, particularly Maura who was no longer a cute baby but a spoilt toddler. Sarah was convinced that Maura’s screams when her wishes were thwarted could shatter glass and her tantrums had to be seen to be believed.
Connie too had begun to rethink her life. She was coming up to thirteen now and in the senior school, and couldn’t miss the reports of the miners’ General Strike.
Now that the coal exports had fallen since the Great War, the miners’ wages were reduced from £6.00 to £3.90. The government also wanted them to work longer hours for that, and a phrase was coined that was printed in the papers:
Not a penny off the pay and not a minute on the day.
No buses, trams or trains ran anywhere, no newspapers were printed or goods unloaded from the docks, the drop forges and foundries grew silent, no coal was mined and, much to the delight of many children, schools were closed. The strike finished after nine days but little had changed and though the miners tried to hang on longer they were forced to capitulate in the end.
‘It is so sad really,’ Angela said, reading it out to her daughter from the newly printed newspaper. ‘We should be thankful we are so much better off than many.’
‘We could be better off still if you would let me leave school next year when I am fourteen and get a job like Sarah intends.’
‘Connie, we have been through all this.’
‘No, we haven’t really done that at all,’ Connie said. ‘You’ve told me what you want me to do with my life, that’s all.’
Angela frowned, for this wasn’t the way her compliant daughter usually behaved.
‘You know that going on to take your School Certificate and going on to college or university is what I’ve been saving for. What’s got into you?’
‘Nothing,’ Connie said. ‘It’s just that … Look, Mammy, if you hadn’t me to look after you would have more money. You could stop worrying about money, wipe the frown from your brow.’
‘If I’ve got a frown on my brow,’ Angela said testily, ‘it’s because I cannot understand the ungratefulness of a girl being handed the chance of a better future on a plate, which many would give their eye teeth for, and rejecting it in that cavalier way and without a word of thanks for the sacrifices I’ve made for you.’
Connie felt immediately contrite.
‘I’m sorry, Mammy,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate all you do for me and I am grateful, truly I am.’
‘I sense a “but” coming.’
‘It’s just that if I go on to matriculate I won’t fit in with the others, maybe even Sarah will think I am getting too big for my boots and …’
‘Connie, this is what your father wanted,’ Angela said and Connie knew she had lost. ‘He paid the ultimate price and fought and died to make the world a safer place for you. He wanted the best for you in all things, including education. Are you going to let him down?’
How could Connie answer that? There was only one way.
‘Of course not, Mammy. If it means so much to you and meant so much to my father, then I will do my level best to make you proud of me when I matriculate. Maybe Daddy will be looking down on me and be proud too.’
Angela gave Connie a kiss. ‘I’m sure he is, my darling girl, and I’m glad you have seen sense and we won’t have to speak of this again.’
Connie hid her sigh of exasperation and thought, as she wasn’t going to be leaving school any time soon, it was about time she started making herself more useful. She decided she would take care of her grandmother, rather than the other way round, and help her mother around the house far more.
So the next morning she slipped out of the bed she shared with Mary in the attic and, while her mother set off for work, made a pan of porridge and a pot of tea and had them waiting for Mary when she had eased her creaking body from the bed, dressed with care and stumbled stiff-legged down the stairs. She also filled a bucket with water from the tap in the yard and the scuttle with coal from the cellar and told her grandmother she would do the same every morning.
And she did and Angela was pleased at her thoughtfulness. On Monday morning Connie began rising even earlier to try to be the first one to fill the copper in the brew house with water from the tap in the yard, light the gas under it and sprinkle the water with soap suds as it heated. Then she would carry all the whites down to boil up while Angela made porridge for them all before she left for work. By the time Connie had eaten breakfast and seen to her grandmother, the whites were boiling in the copper and she would ladle the washing out with the wooden tongs into one of the sinks and empty the copper for others to use. That was as much as she could manage on school days and her mother would deal with everything else after she had finished at the pub, for lateness at school was not tolerated and all latecomers were caned.
In the holidays Connie would help her mother pound the other clothes in the maiding tub with the poss stick, or rub at persistent dirt with soap and the wash board. Then whites were put in a sink with Beckit’s Blue added, and sometimes another with starch, before everything was rinsed well, put through the mangle and pegged on lines lifted to the sky with long, long props to flap dry in the sooty air.
For all they were such a small household, it took most of the day to do the washing and most of Tuesday to do the ironing, unless of course it had rained on the Monday, in which case the damp washing would probably still be draped around the room on Tuesday, cutting off much of the heat from the fire and filling the air with steam. Connie never moaned about this because she knew it was far worse for many bigger families, like the Maguires for instance. She could only imagine the amount of clothes and bedding, towels and clothes they went through in a week, though Sarah said that was another thing that had become easier since her sisters had left home.
‘I can’t wait to do that myself either,’ Sarah said.
‘What?’
‘Leave home,’ said Sarah. ‘Siobhan and Kathy are going to keep an eye out for a job at their place and as soon as I am fourteen I’m off.’
‘Does your mother know that?’
‘Course. Only what she expected,’ Sarah said. Then she looked at Connie and said, ‘Your mammy wants you to take your School Certificate exam and go to college, don’t she?’
Angela nodded her head.
‘Do you want to?’ Sarah asked
‘No,’ Angela said. ‘I want to get out and work. All my life Mammy has worked and provided for me and Granny and I want her to take life easy for a change. If I am earning she will be able to do that. But …’ she gave a shrug, ‘she has her heart set on it. She has been to see the teacher and she says I am one of the children that could really benefit from a secondary education and so that is what she is determined I will have.’
‘How will she afford it?’
‘I asked my granny that when she first said it and Granny said all through the war when Mammy was earning good money in the munitions, every spare penny was saved for that very purpose. She said there is a tidy sum in the post office now.’
‘Is your granny for it too then?’
Angela shook her head. ‘Granny thinks no good comes of stepping out of your class.’
‘Yeah, my mother thinks that too,’ Sarah said. ‘I mean, we live here in a back-to-back house and when we marry it will likely be to someone from round here. And, as my mother says, where will your fine education get you then? And my father says there’s little point in teaching girls any more than the basics because they only get married. He said they should spend less time at school and more with their mothers learning to keep house and cook and rear babies.’
‘I can see that those things might be useful,’ Connie said. ‘But we sort of learn to do those things anyway, don’t we? And I like school.’
‘I know you do,’ Sarah said. ‘Everyone thinks you’re crazy, especially the boys.’
‘Huh, as if anyone gives a jot about what boys think or say.’
‘One day we might care a great deal,’ Sarah said, smiling broadly.
‘Maybe we will, but we’ll be older then and so will they, so it might make better sense,’ Connie said. ‘But for now I wouldn’t give tuppence for their opinion.’
‘All right but your opinion should matter,’ Sarah said. ‘Tell your mother how you feel.’
‘I can’t,’ Connie said. ‘She’d be so upset.’
She remembered how her grandmother told her how her mother would go to put more money in the post office.
‘It was all she thought about. Granny said she was even worse when she found out about the death of Barry. Mammy said the physical loss of him was one thing but she would make sure his daughter did not suffer educationally. She said she owed it to Barry to give me the best start she could. What the teacher said cemented that feeling really.’
How then could Connie throw all the plans she had made in her face? Connie was well aware of the special place she had in her mother’s heart and for that reason she couldn’t bear to hurt her. She knew she had a special place in her grandmother’s heart too and it pained her to see her growing frailer with every passing month.
‘I really don’t know what I’ll do when she’s not there any more,’ she confided to Sarah one day as they walked home from school together.
It was mid-June and the days were becoming warmer and Sarah said, ‘She is bound to rally a little now the summer is here. The winter was a long one and a bone-chilling one and, as my mother says, enough to put years on anyone.’
