Pack Up Your Troubles

Elsie wasn’t the only one to think that way. ‘Needn’t think I’m fighting if it comes to war,’ Brendan growled one evening.

No, Maeve longed to say, you’d rather fight women and weans. But she said nothing to him, as she often didn’t these days, and carried on making a cup of tea. He’d finished his meal and began slurping at his tea while he read the paper. The children sat together on one of the armchairs watching him.

‘I don’t know why he insists on them being there,’ Maeve complained to Elsie one day. ‘I feed them before he comes in and if they’re still hungry I try and give them a bite before bedtime, but he insists they have to sit while he fills his face with things they can only dream about. Grace is frightened enough to sit still and say nothing, but Kevin isn’t. He’d rather be out in the street playing with the others and he’s always fidgeting. One of these days there will be trouble, I can smell it, because although he’s scared witless of his father, he hates him for what he does to me and to us all. Sometimes it comes out in his voice when he talks to him and the way he glares at him. The child isn’t old enough yet, nor wily enough to hide his feelings.’

Just a couple of weeks after this conversation things came to a head. It was mid-June 1938 and six-year-old Kevin had been playing out in the street with his friends and his little sister when his father came home from work.

‘In the house now, Grace, Kevin,’ Brendan rapped out. Grace, in her haste to obey him, scurried along the street, down the entry and across the yard. But Kevin, though he acknowledged what his father had said, made no move to follow him straight away.

When he did leave his friends reluctantly and went in, it was to see his father unfastening his belt, and the child’s face blanched with fear.

Hoping to distract her husband’s attention from Kevin, Maeve hauled herself awkwardly from the chair, her pregnancy hanging heavily on her, and said sharply to the boy, ‘Where have you been? You were called in ten minutes ago.’

Kevin looked at her and Maeve was sure he knew what she was trying to do. ‘You’ll go straight to bed this minute,’ she said angrily. ‘Maybe then you’ll remember to come in when you’re called.’

She knew if she could get him away, out of Brendan’s sight, he had a chance. Afterwards, she intended to talk to Kevin, as she gave him a little supper after his father had gone to the pub, and tell him never to risk that situation again.

She thought – even Kevin thought – they’d got away with it. Keeping his eyes averted from his father’s, for to look at them turned his legs to jelly, Kevin walked across the room and without a word opened the door to the stairs. It was then that he felt the wrench on his collar as he was yanked back into the room with such violence the buttons were torn from his shirt and the back of the material ripped open, and, as Brendan tore the rest of it from his body, Kevin began to shake.

‘This young man’s got too big for his boots,’ Brendan said. ‘I say he needs teaching a lesson. What d’you say, Maeve?’

‘No!’ Maeve had been knocked off balance by Brendan’s actions, but she pulled herself away from the wall and cried, ‘Don’t you dare touch him, Brendan! Don’t you bloody dare!’

‘Dare! Dare!’ While she was still holding Kevin, Brendan grabbed Maeve’s arm and bent it up her back so that she cried out with the pain of it.

‘Leave him, Brendan, for God’s sake,’ she pleaded when she could speak. ‘He’s just a wee boy.’

‘Aye, and a wee boy who has to grow up with respect for his father,’ Brendan snapped, and he pushed Maeve from him and laid Kevin across his knees.

The boy’s anguished eyes met those of Maeve. ‘Mom,’ he cried, and jumped with pain at the suddenness of the belt on his bare skin.

The belt had come down on Kevin’s back once more and his screams were reverberating through the house before Maeve recovered enough to throw herself against Brendan again. This time he was more furious with his wife, but he held on to Kevin tightly, knowing if he let him go he would scurry away. He tried to shrug Maeve off, but she wouldn’t be shifted. Instead she lunged forward and raked her fingers down his face. Enraged, he turned round, holding Kevin tight in his arms, and aimed a vicious kick towards Maeve’s stomach, and the force of it sent her cannoning into the wall. She banged her head, knocking herself dizzy, and slithered down to a sitting position with her head spinning and such severe shocking pains in her stomach that she doubled over in agony.

She saw that Kevin’s back was crisscrossed with stripes, some of which oozed blood. Maeve lay, too stunned and sore to move, and screamed for help, and her screams matched those of her small son.

Maeve was never sure what would have happened that night if Elsie hadn’t come in from next door. She ignored her husband’s advice to leave well alone and went in unannounced. Afterwards, she described the scene to him. ‘The child was beaten black and blue,’ she said. ‘The man’s a maniac and needs to be locked up. Maeve lay there groaning in a corner, and Grace was sobbing too, her hands over her eyes and a puddle at her feet where she’d wet herself with fear.’

Brendan wanted no doctor fetched. They had, he said, no money for doctors. Maeve would be as right as rain after a night’s sleep and he was only chastising the boy as it was a father’s right.

Elsie thought differently, said so forcibly and dispatched her Alf to fetch the doctor. She filled a kettle with water, put it on to boil and ran up for blankets to wrap around Maeve and her son. She’d reached the bedroom when she remembered Maeve had pawned the blankets and hadn’t yet got the money together to redeem them. Instead she grabbed two coats and put one round Maeve’s shoulders. She pushed the two armchairs together and put Kevin’s limp form down on his stomach and she gently placed the coat over his lacerated body. There was no sign of Brendan, for which she was mighty glad, and she drew Grace, still sobbing, into her arms and tried to soothe her.

Dr Fleming took in the situation at once. On his way to the house he’d passed Brendan Hogan and had seen clearly the man’s scratched cheeks, but when he saw Kevin’s injuries he was appalled. He examined Maeve and knew she was in premature labour and had to go to hospital. The unborn baby didn’t stand a chance of surviving, but if the mother was going to live, she needed hospital care.

Some hours later, Maeve lay in hospital while doctors tried to save the life of her and her baby, who was struggling to be born weeks too early. As the night wore on, despite all their care, Maeve’s pains became worse and by the morning she’d given birth to a small, premature and underdeveloped stillborn baby boy. Her scalding tears were of little comfort to her and hate for her husband festered in her soul. She was determined to leave him at the first opportunity. If not for her sake, then for the sake of Kevin because she was suffused with guilt that she’d been unable to prevent Brendan wielding his vicious temper on his young son.

But opportunity wasn’t a thing that Maeve had in abundance. For two weeks she lay in hospital while Elsie cared for her children, trying to think of some way out of the dilemma she was in. Elsie had had to keep Kevin away from school for the first week while his back healed, though she thought he might carry the marks for ever. Grace had been sworn to secrecy lest the children be taken away. The doctor had wanted to inform the authorities, but Maeve had begged him not to. She was terrified her children would be taken from her and then she knew she’d have the devil’s own job to get them back, and so reluctantly Dr Fleming agreed to say nothing. Brendan, however, was forced to return to his mother’s house, for Elsie refused even to boil a kettle for the man she called a drunken bully.

For the fortnight, Maeve plotted and planned, but all her thoughts came to nothing, for she lacked that basic commodity – money. She came out of hospital at the end of June quite desperate and yet no nearer to achieving her objective.

‘You can’t stay with the man,’ Elsie stormed.

‘I can’t leave him either,’ Maeve cried back. ‘Where in heaven’s name would I go with two children and no job?’

There was only one place, Maeve knew it and Elsie knew it. That was to go across the water to her mother’s. ‘Surely to God, Maeve, when you tell her how things are, she won’t refuse to take you in?’

‘No,’ Maeve said. ‘She’d support me if she only knew the half of it.’

‘Well then?’

‘Well then nothing, Elsie. How the hell am I to find the money to take us all to Ireland? You know I haven’t money to bless myself with.’

‘Could you ask your mammy?’

‘I could not,’ Maeve cried. ‘Don’t ever think of such a thing. She has six others besides myself, and the youngest still at school.’

And there the matter rested.

But a couple of weeks later, it reared its ugly head again. In the first week of Maeve’s release from hospital the doctor had told Brendan quite forcibly that he had to leave Maeve alone and for a good while, and even the priest, Father Trelawney, alerted by the doctor as to Maeve’s delicate state of health, told him he must curb his natural desires and show patience.

He showed patience, though his temper was surly and he lashed out at Maeve often, but she could cope with that. It wasn’t in the nature of an actual beating. But by the third week of July, three weeks after she’d been released from hospital, Brendan reckoned Maeve had had enough time to get over whatever it was had ailed her, and he began again demanding his rights. Maeve lay passive beneath him and prayed she wouldn’t become pregnant again, but she was afraid of inflaming his temper further by refusing.

About this time, Elsie came in one day in a fever of excitement. The two children were out playing when she burst in. ‘I’ve got a job for you,’ Elsie said.

‘What?’ Maeve looked at her in astonishment.

‘You heard. A job,’ Elsie repeated. ‘I’ve just been in Mountford’s and the old man has had a heart attack. It wasn’t serious, like – it was in the way of a warning – but the doctor said he had to take life easier for a bit and Mrs Mountford asked me if I would work a few hours to help her out for a bit, or if I knew of someone trustworthy. I thought of you straight off, for this way you can earn enough to take you to see your mother in Ireland.’

‘Elsie, I couldn’t,’ Maeve said. ‘Brendan would never—’

‘You don’t tell Brendan,’ Elsie told her firmly. ‘And you certainly don’t bloody well ask him.’

‘But he’d know,’ Maeve insisted, thinking how close and how public Mountford’s corner shop was.

‘How would he?’ Elsie demanded. ‘Mrs Mountford told me the hours. Ten to four, Monday to Friday except for Wednesday, when the shop closes at one o’clock, and nine till two on Saturday. You’d manage that, and still be home to cook the sod his tea.’

Maeve knew she would. Brendan left the house at half-past six in the morning and didn’t come home till half-six in the evening – that was when he came straight home. On Saturdays he finished work at one and went on to the pub and didn’t come home till at least half-past three. But still she hesitated. ‘I couldn’t, Elsie.’

‘Why not? You just tell old George Mountford and his missus, Edith, that you have experience. They’ll snap you up.’

‘What about the weans?’

‘What about them?’ Elsie had said. ‘You can take them to school in the mornings and I’ll collect and mind them in the afternoons till you come in. Saturdays, you leave them in with me.’

‘Ah, Elsie . . .’ Maeve said. She knew she had a great deal to be grateful for in the older woman and to prevent her getting all tearful about it, asked in a jocular way, ‘Are you dying to get rid of me so much?’

‘Aye. You’ve guessed,’ Elsie said, but her eyes were moist and she hoped Maeve wouldn’t notice, and to prevent her doing just that she said sternly, ‘Get yourself down that shop before I put my bloody boot behind you. I’ll put the kettle on and we’ll have a cup of tea to celebrate your new job when you get back.’

‘Don’t count your chickens,’ Maeve said as she went out the door.