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

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.’