Pack Up Your Troubles

Maeve saw the children were fascinated by the peat fire that everything was cooked on, the frying pan with the sizzling ham and eggs at the side of it, and the potatoes in a large pot fastened to a hook on a black metal bar that swung out from the wall.

The smell tantalised them all, and Maeve and the children were glad enough to scramble up to the table to eat the fine meal. It was served with butter yellower than the children had ever seen – not that they’d seen much butter at all in their young lives – and slices of bread that Maeve explained was soda bread.

Maeve was grateful to her father for keeping the conversation going around the table that first night. He didn’t touch on the reasons for their being there, but instead asked the children questions about their school and friends, and told little stories and anecdotes of his own to put them at their ease. Maeve saw the children start to relax and open up to the kind man she’d always found her father to be. She saw his eyes light on her often and felt comforted, for she knew her father would be understanding and sympathetic when he knew the reason for her flight home.

Much later that night, Maeve sat and talked to her mother. They were alone. The children and young ones, Colin and Nuala, had all gone to bed, and Rosemarie had gone out with her young man, and her father was taking his last walk round the farm with the two dogs, as he was wont to do, checking on the beasts. Maeve had waited until she’d got her mother to herself before she began to explain, and once they were seated before the fire with a cup of tea apiece she began, ‘I’m sorry to land on you like this, Mammy, but really I had to come. Brendan is . . . isn’t the man I thought he was. I mean not like the man I married.’

‘Then he’s like many a one, cutie dear,’Annie said. ‘How has he changed?’

‘Well, Brendan earns good money, but I see little of it,’ Maeve burst out. ‘Sometimes I have barely enough to feed us. The weans go to bed hungry often. If it weren’t for Elsie next door—’

‘God, girl!’ Annie exclaimed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re telling your business to the neighbours?’

‘Mammy, the neighbours would know even if I didn’t say a word,’ Maeve explained. ‘It’s not like here. We live on top of one another. The whole street, the whole neighbourhood, knows your business. But Elsie’s not like that, anyway. She’s a friend and she helps me. God, there’s times I don’t know where I’d have been without her.’

‘Where is your husband in all this?’ Annie asked her daughter, tight-lipped.

‘My husband? Did you say my husband?’ Maeve asked crisply. ‘My husband, Mammy, is down at the pub every night, not caring if we go cold and hungry, as long as he has his beer money. Then, when he has his belly full, he comes home and takes it out on me, or wee Kevin.’

‘He hits you?’ Annie cried, at last incensed on her daughter’s behalf.

‘Aye, sometimes he just hits me. I can cope with that. It’s when he really lays into me so my body is bruised everywhere and my face a swollen mess, with my eyes blackened and my lips split, that’s what I find hard to bear.’

Annie’s mouth had dropped open in shock as Maeve spoke, and when she’d finished she still stared at her, while her lips formed words, but no sound came out.

‘I’m sorry, Mammy, for blurting it out like that,’ Maeve said. ‘But it’s how it is often when he has the drink in him. But other times he can be sober, or nearly sober, and yet he takes his belt off to Kevin.’

‘No!’ Annie cried. The rearing of her children had in the main been left to her, although there had been occasions when Thomas had sometimes seen fit to discipline his sons for some serious misdemeanour. He’d used nothing but the flat of his hand across their backsides and they’d grown up with respect for him because of it. But a belt on a wee boy . . .!

‘You’ll see the marks yet across his back,’ Maeve said. ‘Brendan’s been at him since the child was three years old. I get in between them and then I catch it. I think,’ Maeve went on, ‘he resents the weans and especially Kevin. Every time I tell him I’m pregnant, I know I’m for it.’

‘Oh, Maeve, why didn’t you tell us sooner?’

‘After I’d made such a fuss to marry Brendan, I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake and I didn’t want to worry you. What in God’s name could you do?’

‘What about your Uncle Michael?’ Annie asked. ‘My heart was easier about you because he was there.’

‘Well, he’s not so near really,’ Maeve said. ‘It’s not like Ballyglen in Birmingham, you know, where everyone in the town is just a stop away from one another. It’s a tidy walk, but I do go and see him now and again. But his wife, Agnes, isn’t so terribly welcoming.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Mammy, Michael hasn’t got the fine house he’d have us believe. It’s just a back-to-back like my own, though it’s better furnished. Also, he has a job and a good one, but before this talk of war he was put on short time – three days a week, and some weeks only two. They were suffering themselves and very glad of the money and food you sent.’

Annie could scarcely believe what she was hearing. All the time Maeve had been in England, she’d comforted herself with the fact that she was being looked after by her uncle, who had a good job, a sizeable house and plenty of money to help his niece should she fall on hard times. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’

Maeve shrugged. ‘It was Michael’s tale to tell,’ she said. ‘Anyway, even if Uncle Michael had been better off it would hardly have mattered.’ Maeve hated bad-mouthing Michael to her mother, the baby brother she had always loved, but she felt Annie had to know how it was.

‘It would be no good complaining to him about Brendan. He likes him, Mammy. Brendan is a man’s man. When Michael told you he was a fine figure of a man, he told the truth as he saw it. He still feels that. And, even if he should want to help, Aunt Agnes wouldn’t let him, for he does what she wants him to.’

‘Does Agnes not like him helping his family?’

‘No, she doesn’t,’ Maeve said. ‘Her family live all around her and she sees them all the time, but she didn’t want Uncle Michael’s coming over from Ireland and making demands on him.’

‘Is he still on this short-time work?’

‘No,’ Maeve said. ‘Everyone’s fully employed now, with war looming. Uncle Michael’s even got overtime, more than he needs, really, in the foundry. His children, Jane and Billy, are both working too, both in munitions factories. There’s plenty of work for everyone now and plenty of money. Even Aunt Agnes is thinking of getting a job.’

‘Aunt Agnes?’

‘It’s not so shocking over there, Mammy, to see women working,’ Maeve told her mother. ‘Agnes says they’ll need the women if the men get called up, as they’re sure to like they did in the last war. I got a job in a shop and that’s how I scraped the money up to come here, and kit the weans out with decent things.’

‘I wondered how you managed it,’ Annie said. ‘I mean, with Brendan keeping you so short I know you couldn’t have saved it out of the housekeeping.’

‘God, no. It’s bad enough to try and find the money to keep body and soul alive on what he hands over, and he would have it back off me if I didn’t take it to the shops that very day. Mind, all it does is pay off the tick, for the things I’ve had in the week.’

Annie shook her head to think of her daughter suffering this way when they had plenty to eat for every meal. ‘And not a word about a job in your letters?’

‘I couldn’t risk telling you, and you letting Michael know, and have him say something to Brendan.’

‘Surely the neighbours knew?’ Annie said. ‘You said they knew everyone’s business.’

‘Oh yes, they knew,’ Maeve said. ‘At least the women did. I served them. But they knew the life I was leading. They knew the way the weans lived and knew they got little enough to eat. The women probably thought good luck to me if I managed to earn something to feed them properly. Anyway, whatever they thought, no one whispered a word of it.’

‘And what made you decide to come home in the end?’ Annie said.

Maeve was quiet for a moment and then she said, ‘At first, at the very beginning, I used to get the feeling that somehow I deserved what was happening to me. That I must have done something wrong, or Brendan wouldn’t have been so angry with me. I never felt that way, though, when he was hitting Kevin. Then I just felt angry, but for myself . . . Elsie said I was a fool, and that he’d kill me in the end, but I was so scared of him by then, I couldn’t think straight.’

‘Oh, my dear girl.’

Maeve hadn’t been aware she was crying until her mother spoke. She scrubbed at her eyes impatiently and went on, ‘It’s all right, Mammy. I’m fine now. Let me tell you everything before Daddy is back, and you can then let him know what you see fit. You see, it was the first miscarriage when I realised I truly hated and despised the man I’d once loved so much. I felt sad about it too; it felt like a failure. I’d imagined Brendan and I would have such a rosy future ahead of us.

‘Before we married and even in the first few months while we lived above the café and before I fell pregnant with Kevin, we were happy. So when he lashed out at me at first, I felt that in some way I deserved it. It seems crazy now, Mammy, but I hadn’t realised anyone could change so much. And then he was always so sorry in the beginning. He always begged me to forgive him and promised it wouldn’t happen again. It was when I became pregnant with Grace that I had the first bad beating from him and after that, he never bothered to apologise any more.’

She looked up at her mother and saw that her mother’s eyes were brimming with tears. ‘You must think I was stupid, Mammy.’

‘God love you, not at all, at all,’ Annie told Maeve, her voice husky with emotion and she clasped one of her daughter’s hands in her own and held it tight. ‘Go on, pet.’

Maeve sighed. ‘After that, Mammy, I knew I’d married a bully and that was going to be the pattern of my life from then on, and fear had sort of taken over from love. But God, Mammy, when I lost the first baby – you mind, I wrote and told you about the two miscarriages early on?’

‘Aye. I was heartsore for you, so I was.’

‘Mammy, I lost those babies after a good hiding from Brendan,’ Maeve said. ‘I wasn’t eating properly either because there was so little food in the house. The first time he hadn’t known I was pregnant and I lay in bed, knowing there was no longer a baby growing inside me and I felt useless. I could do nothing about my own life and couldn’t even protect my unborn child. I not only feared Brendan, but I also realised I hated him.

‘Then I lost another at three months, in much the same way as the first, but this time Brendan knew I was pregnant and concentrated his attack on my stomach and seemed almost satisfied when I miscarried. The last one I lost because of a vicious kick in the stomach that I got from trying to protect Kevin. Then, with me out of action, because he’d nearly knocked me senseless – I still have the scars from the hobnails on my stomach – he really took it out of the child. He beat him black and blue. I think he might have beaten him to death that night if Elsie hadn’t come in. She got the doctor in and he sent for an ambulance for me.’

‘God, child, this is terrible,’ Annie said, greatly distressed. ‘And for you to tell not a soul . . .’

‘I was ashamed,’ Maeve said. ‘I don’t know what of, either. It wasn’t me should have been ashamed. When the doctors asked me about the boot-shaped bruise on my stomach, I told them I’d fallen over the fireguard. They didn’t believe me, but I stuck to my story. Then, when I missed my period again this month, I knew I had to get away. Can we stay, Mammy, till I get myself sorted out?’