Daughter of Mine

‘Look, Tressa, many start with less and manage,’ Mike told her. ‘We have a bit saved between us and I know you’ve been picking up bits and pieces in the market. I’ll put in for any overtime going and as long as you are feeling all right you can work a wee while yet, till the wedding at least.’

‘Where will we live?’

‘We might have to stay with my mom and dad for now,’ Mike said.

Tressa gave a shiver of distaste. Mike’s parents were almost as bad as Steve’s and Mike’s two sisters also adored their baby brother. They’d resented Tressa from the beginning, sensing how Mike felt about her. They were too clever to do this in front of Mike, when they were icily polite, but they had plenty of opportunity to give digs and make comments to show Tressa she wasn’t welcome in their family. Tressa never complained about this to Mike, for she knew the high regard he held his family in and she told herself it was Mike she loved and was marrying, not his family. But then she’d never envisaged living with them.

Mike, catching sight of her face by the light from the lamppost, said quite sharply, ‘It’s no good looking like that, Tressa. It’s my parents or the streets as far as I can see just now.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. It’s just not what I imagined.’

‘D’you think I did?’ Mike snapped, and then he put his arms around Tressa. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ he said, kissing her gently. ‘I’m a brute yelling at you. It’s all my fault, because I know you would have waited.’

Tressa knew Mike spoke the truth. However hard it was, she would have held out to keep her virginity till the wedding night if Mike hadn’t wanted it so much. That first night, the night of the engagement, she’d done it fearfully to please him, because she knew he expected it, and she’d been totally bowled over by the experience. Few of the women she had spoken to had mentioned any enjoyment they got from sex, never mind the exhilarating, mind-blowing rapture Tressa had felt. After that first time she’d been as anxious to repeat the experience as Mike was, and so she said, ‘No, I loved you too much to want to wait.’

‘Well,’ Mike said with a rueful grin. ‘See where our loving has got us both?’

‘Aye.’

‘You’ve had time to think and worry about this,’ Mike said. ‘To me it’s like a bolt from the blue. Who else have you told?’

‘No one,’ Tressa said. ‘But I think Lizzie suspects. I’ve been sick a few times in the morning, you see. I’ve even seen Pat and Betty looking at me oddly a time or two. But they’ve said nothing and neither have I.’

‘We need to get things organised,’ Mike decided. ‘I think we should tell Mom and Dad straight away.’

Tressa quailed inside at the thought of that and yet she knew they’d have to know, and fast, for a wedding had to be arranged speedily. ‘What about my mammy and daddy?’ she asked suddenly. ‘They’ll have to give permission; I’m not twenty till July. I’ll have to tell them face to face. We’ll have to go over on a flying visit.’

‘First things first,’ Mike said. ‘Let’s tell my parents tonight and at least get that over and done with.’

‘She looked at me like I was some sort of slag,’ Tressa cried later to the three girls grouped about the bed. ‘She said…she said it…it was all my fault; that…that I’d trapped her son, snared him in some way.’ She looked at them all, her face red and awash with tears, twisting a sodden handkerchief in her agitated hands. ‘It wasn’t like that. Mike and I love each other.’

None of the girls were surprised. Mothers seemed to care more for sons than daughters and they all knew how Mike’s family behaved towards Tressa for she’d told them bits before, but now wasn’t the time to remind her of that.

‘Come on, bab. Don’t take on,’ Betty said. ‘These things happen. She’s likely in shock.’

‘At least your man’s standing by you,’ Pat added. ‘That’s summat today.’

‘That’s not all,’ Tressa said. ‘She says we can’t stay with them. That she’d never live with the shame and that she’s writing to her brother Arthur and his wife Doreen, to see if we can live there after the wedding. I don’t even know the man and he lives in Longbridge.’

‘Where’s that?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Bloody miles away,’ Pat said. ‘You don’t even know these people?’

‘No, but apparently they’ve always had a soft spot for Mike,’ Tressa said. ‘They had four daughters all growing up when Mike was a boy and he used to go and stay with them both. Mike told me this Arthur always wanted him to go into the car industry with him, but Mike said he’d have to live with them and he knew his parents would have been hurt. And,’ she added bitterly, ‘then they might have been. Now, they can’t get rid of him quick enough, and God alone knows what my parents will say when we go over and tell them.’

‘So, if they agree, you’ll go to live in Longbridge?’ Lizzie asked, and suddenly realised how she would miss her cousin. They’d lived only a few miles apart since they’d been born and had lived in the hotel together for two years. They almost knew the secrets of each other’s soul.

But, she told herself, this was no time to think of herself. There was a wedding to arrange, and hurried forward or not, Lizzie was determined to do all she could to make the day a wonderful one for Tressa and one she could think back on with pride.

Saturday, 14th June 1932, and the wedding reception, held in the back room of The Bell, was in full swing. Lizzie had worked hard to keep her promise to make this a day to remember, but she doubted Tressa would look back on it with any sort of pride, though she’d probably remember the glowering looks Mike’s sisters and parents cast in her direction.

But then Tressa’s parents, though they had been bitterly disappointed with Tressa when she and Mike had gone over to tell them they had to get married and speedily, were inclined to blame Mike. Before Tressa had gone to England she’d never even dated a boy, never mind kissed one. And now!

‘The man must have taken advantage of her,’ Eamon said. ‘She was young and innocent and had her heart turned.’

‘Well at least he’ll marry her,’ Margaret had said with a sigh of relief.

When they came over and saw the fawning way Mike’s parents and sisters behaved towards him, they’d been even more incensed, and when the two families had to speak to each other you could almost feel the disdainful animosity between them.

Lizzie wished she could tell them both to behave, for Tressa and Mike’s sakes, if for no one else’s. Neither of the two young people had meant to hurt and disappoint anyone, they had just let their feelings overwhelm them. It wasn’t as if they’d never intended to get married, for goodness’ sake.

Tressa, far from enjoying her day, seemed to be constantly agitated, buffeted as she was between her parents and her new in-laws. Lizzie came upon her in tears in the hall a few minutes after she’d seen Mike’s mother speak sharply to her about something. ‘For God’s sake, Tressa, stop crying,’ she said impatiently. ‘Don’t you see it’s what the old cow wants?’

‘I never knew you were so unfeeling.’

‘I never knew you were so feeble,’ Lizzie retorted. ‘For God’s sake. You wanted Mike and you’ve got him. You know, whenever it was done, Mike’s mother would never have fallen on your neck in gratitude. Here,’ she said, pulling a compact from her bag, ‘wash your face and put this under your eyes to hide the puffiness, pinch your cheeks to give them colour, paint a smile right across your face and go and talk to Mike’s Uncle Arthur.’

Lizzie liked Arthur and Doreen. She saw they thought a lot of Mike, but in an understanding type of way, not as if he was a creature from another, and much superior, planet. They didn’t even seem that shocked about the pregnancy. ‘In my day, young girls were chaperoned a bit more,’ Doreen said. ‘And even then…takes you by surprise, those feelings, and when young people are alone so much, well, it’s human nature really, isn’t it? They were engaged, after all, and you just have to look at them to see they are made for each other.’

And they were. Despite the atmosphere of the place and the families grouped on opposite sides of the hall, their love for each other shone and sparkled between them.

All in all, Lizzie thought, Tressa had fallen on her feet. Mike’s uncle had told her he was a sort of boss in the car factory at Longbridge and had already secured Mike a job on the assembly line. He also had a large terraced house, where there were two rooms downstairs and a breakfast room/kitchen and they said Tressa and Mike were to be given one of the rooms downstairs for themselves, and were to have one of the four bedrooms on the first floor.

‘When the nipper’s old enough, there’s two attic rooms above,’ Arthur told Tressa. ‘Plenty of room for all of us. Tell you the truth, me and Doreen have rattled about in the old house since the girls grew up and moved on, and Doreen at least will be glad of the company. She’s that excited about a baby in the house, and I’ll be glad to get Mike out the brass industry, I’ll tell you.’

‘But it’s so far away,’ Tressa complained to Lizzie.

‘You’ll soon settle down,’ Lizzie said. ‘How far was this place from Ballintra and we settled here fine.’

‘Aye, but we had each other.’

‘And now you have Mike and an uncle and aunt who’ll welcome you, and soon a wee baby too, all of your very own. You won’t be lonely then, and you’ll be too busy to blow your nose, never mind miss anyone.’

And so she could reassure her cousin, but she knew that when Tressa left there would be a gaping hole in her own life. When, later that evening, Arthur said to her, ‘You’ll miss Tressa,’ she could do nothing but nod her head, because she couldn’t trust herself to speak.

She was glad Pat and Betty had been invited, but not that keen to see Steve, who’d been Mike’s best man. It was the first time she had seen him since that awful business in February, when he’d taken a swing at the policeman, and she knew by the glares he was casting her that he hadn’t forgotten either.

Tressa had said that, according to Mike, Steve had taken up with someone called Stuart Fellows, and Lizzie supposed he was the man keeping Steve company at the bar. She wasn’t terribly impressed with him, but she told herself it was none of her business if Steve Gillespie went about with a man from Mars. Anyway, she’d probably not see Steve again when this day was over, and that would suit her just fine.

‘You should have dropped dead with the look that old woman’s giving you,’ Betty said suddenly, and Lizzie glanced up. ‘Oh, that’s Steve’s mother,’ she said. ‘Flo was never keen on me, and Mike told Tressa she blames me for Steve getting locked up that night in February.’

Betty remembered the night well, and Lizzie went on, ‘Tressa said some of the neighbours gave her a hard time about it, but most of that was her own fault. I mean, she’s been blowing Steve’s trumpet for years. You name it, he had it and in dollops, far more than any other boy born this side of paradise, and that understandably put a lot of women’s backs up. They must have thought when they read in the papers that he’d been charged, for assaulting a policeman no less, and for being drunk and disorderly and causing an affray, they had something to make Flo squirm with for a change, pay her back for her bragging. I can’t say I blame them.’

‘How does Steve feel?’

‘I don’t know and don’t really care.’ Lizzie said emphatically.

‘He seems near welded to the bar with that other fellow.’