Pack Up Your Troubles

‘You’ll get it,’ Elsie said to her retreating back.

‘Sweet Jesus, let her get this job,’ she whispered. Jobs were hard to come by and if Maeve didn’t get this, there could be a long wait for another and anything might have happened to her by then. Elsie knelt down on the rag rug in front of the firegrate and said a decade of rosary for her and hoped no one would take it in their head to pop in and see her kneeling to pray in the middle of the morning.

Maeve loved working for George and Edith Mountford, and as the months passed, she realised she’d seldom been so happy. Around her people were talking about the war that everyone now knew was imminent, and yet she was feeling very content. Her life was even easier once Kevin passed his seventh birthday in November and took himself and Grace to school and back every day.

The children were looking marginally better than they had. Maeve bought a few nice things for them to eat and some new clothes they desperately needed, though most of her wages were stored in the tin cash box in Elsie’s house, to buy the tickets that were to be her and her children’s passport to freedom. As part of Maeve’s wages, Edith always made up a basket for her on Saturday afternoon and Maeve was surprised by the Mountfords’ generosity. She’d had to hide a lot of the produce in the wardrobe in the attic, only bringing out a few things at a time to stack on the shelves. It would never do to arouse Brendan’s suspicions.

It surprised Maeve as time went on that no one let on to him that she worked in the corner shop, for everyone knew. She served neighbours in the shop every day and yet no one said a word about it to Brendan.

‘Why would they tell your old man?’ Elsie asked when she queried it. ‘Most of the women don’t like him. They know he keeps you short of money and knocks you about. They think you’ve got guts to put up with it and earn some money to provide for your kids. They won’t split on you.’

And they didn’t. And Maeve coped, although for the first week or two she found it tiring being on her feet all day and then dealing with the children and cooking a meal when she got home. But she watched the money rise in the cash box and it cheered her. The cash box had been her first purchase and she knew there was no place to hide money in her house. If Brendan even got a sniff there was any to be had, he’d tear the place apart until he found it and have it off her. It had to be left in Elsie’s keeping, but Elsie had suggested the cash box with a key, which Maeve must keep.

Maeve had been working at the shop just over a fortnight when Brendan gave her such a beating one night that she was bruised from head to toe the next day. Every movement hurt, but she forced her stiffened limbs into action, for she wasn’t missing a day from her job.

Edith Mountford looked at her bruised face and the left eye nearly closed and asked, ‘What happened to you?’

‘I walked into a door,’ Maeve said.

‘Some bloody door,’ Edith remarked. ‘Stick to that story if you want, but both you and I know what manner of door it was. You poor sod.’

The sympathy in her voice brought tears springing to Maeve’s eyes, but she brushed them away and Edith said, ‘You’d best work in the back for a couple of days till your face settles down a bit. You don’t want folks gaping at you.’

Maeve was grateful for the older woman’s understanding and she spent the next two days bagging up the flour, tea, sugar, currants and raisins, and doing the accounts and ordering new supplies, the tasks that Edith usually did. By the third day the bruising was more yellow than blue, but Maeve bought cosmetics in the chemist’s that she hoped hid much of that, and the puffiness around her eye, and went back into the shop.

Many asked where she’d been, or looked at her rather curiously, but none asked outright what had happened to her face. Edith thought they didn’t have to ask, for despite the repair job Maeve had attempted, most of her customers would know she’d had a good hiding. And it was a beating and a half. Edith had seen the bruises covering Maeve’s arms when she’d pushed up the sleeves of her overall when she’d been bagging up in the back.

Maeve knew too, and decided in future she’d have to try to protect her face in some way. Edith, kind as she was, couldn’t keep her on if she was unfit to serve in the shop.

These thoughts came to her mind the next time Brendan started on her, one night about three weeks later. ‘Get up, you lazy sod, and get me a drink,’ he growled.

Maeve sighed but that was enough.

‘I said get up.’ His hand reached for her and she felt the flimsy slip she slept in rip down the middle.

She saw his fist and ducked as she screamed at him, ‘Leave me alone!’

Heedless even of the sleeping children in the attic, intent only on protecting herself, she stopped him for an instant with her cry, and she saw the cruel sardonic smile on his mouth. She knew it was useless to try to fight and so she tried threats.

Twisting from his grasp, she left a piece of her slip in his hands and she rolled off the other side of the bed and stood facing him. ‘You touch me, Brendan, and I’ll shout it from the rooftops,’ she yelled at him. ‘And I’ll go down in the morning to St Catherine’s and tell the priest. Do you confess it, I wonder, the times you beat me?’

‘You’re my wife, you stupid cow. I have the right to chastise you.’

‘What right?’ Maeve demanded. ‘And your family? Do they know what manner of man you are?’

But even as she spoke, she thought they probably did. Brendan’s four brothers treated their wives shamefully. Maeve wasn’t sure if they knocked them about, but the women were kept as short of money as she was, and she’d seen Brendan’s mother, Lily, with a split lip on one occasion and a black eye on another. In a household like that, she doubted they’d turn a hair if she complained to them about Brendan.

‘Or I could tell my Uncle Michael,’ she said. ‘He’d sort you out if he knew the half of it.’ But she knew that her uncle would do nothing, even if he believed her.

‘You stupid bitch!’ Brendan cried, and he leapt over the bed and gave Maeve such a punch that she was knocked off her feet. But she was up again quickly – she had no desire to be kicked senseless – and she tried to protect her face as the blows rained down on her.

Eventually Brendan stopped laying into her and pulled her hands from her face. She smelt the sour, beery stink of him as he yelled at her, ‘Now do as you’re bloody well told and get me a sodding drink.’

Maeve was glad to go, glad to get away from the man, but as she filled the kettle, she prayed she had enough gas to boil it and still have some for the morning.

But when she returned to the bedroom with the mug of tea in her hand, it was to see that Brendan had fallen on to the bed and now lay flat on top of the covers still in his clothes. His eyes were shut and snores were emanating from his open mouth. Maeve sighed in grateful relief and eased herself into the bed beside him, taking great care not to waken him.

After that night, he left her alone for a while. However, Maeve knew the situation wouldn’t last. Brendan was essentially a bully, and a bully he’d remain. So when in the middle of March 1939 she missed a period, she knew the time had come to leave.

First though, Maeve took the children down to the rag market in the Bull Ring and bought them new clothes, for she’d not take them home to her mother in tatters. The clothes she’d bought them when she first started at Mountford’s had been decent underwear to replace the ragged pieces they had, but these new things had to be hidden at Elsie’s to allay Brendan’s suspicions. She also bought them their first sandals and a little grey haversack each to carry their own clothes in.

Even after her purchases there were over twelve pounds in the tin. The train from New Street would cost a guinea altogether for the two children and one pound one and sixpence for Maeve, and the ferry would cost her fifty shillings and half of that amount each for Kevin and Grace.

‘It will be over seven pounds,’ Elsie said. ‘It’s a powerful amount of money.’

Maeve knew it was and she had yet to price the rail bus – the last leg of her journey home. But whatever it cost, she would pay it. She’d go home and raise her children – including the child as yet unborn – in dignity and free from fear.

It was hard saying goodbye to the Mountfords, but harder still saying goodbye to Elsie.

‘He’ll come round here, you know,’ Maeve said. ‘It’ll be the first place he’ll make for.’

‘I’ll just act dumb; it won’t be hard for me to do,’ and Elsie gave a wry smile.

‘He’ll know where I’ve gone,’ Maeve said. ‘God, he knows I have nowhere else.’

‘Will you tell your uncle?’

‘Not before I leave. He sees no harm in Brendan. Not that I’ve told him anything, because his wife, Agnes, is not the understanding type and I didn’t want to be running to him with my problems. If I was to tell him now, he’d probably think we’d just had a wee bit of a row and it only needed him to come and have a wee chat with us both and everything would be all right again.’

‘He’d do that?’ Elsie cried. ‘He’d tell him – even if you asked him not to?’

‘He might,’ Maeve said. ‘He might feel it was his duty. Anyway, I’m not going to risk it.’

And she told no one else either. Barely had the door closed behind Brendan the next morning, before she pulled the case from off the top of the wardrobe and began piling her clothes in it.

She shook the children awake. She hadn’t dared whisper a word of their escape before in case the children let something slip. Kevin was cranky because he was tired and Grace was still sleepy. But when Maeve told them where they were going, all thoughts of sleep sped from them. She said they were going on a train and a big ship over the water to Ireland to see their other gran, Granny Brannigan.

Then she gave them the haversacks and told them to put all their clothes in them. She then put out some of the new clothes that they hadn’t been able to wear yet, the ones she’d kept hidden at Elsie’s.

When they were ready to go, Maeve told them of the bag she’d filled for them with nice things to eat. There were sandwiches of jam, cheese and ham, with sausages and hard-boiled eggs that she’d cooked the night before to eat cold, and a swiss roll for afterwards. She had made two bottles of tea for herself, accepted a bottle of dandelion-and-burdock pop for the children from the Mountfords and packed a couple of old cups without handles to drink from.

‘When can we start on the picnic?’ Kevin had said, his mouth watering at the thought of it.

‘We can have some of the sandwiches on the train,’ Maeve had told him. ‘But not all of them, and no cake and only a little bit of pop.’

‘Oh, Mammy.’

‘It’s no good going on like that,’ Maeve had said sharply. ‘The food has got to last us a long time. It will take us all day to get home.’