Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Anne Bennett 2000

First published in 2000 by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover photographs © Gordon Crabb (woman); John Topham /TopFoto (street scene).

Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007547807

Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007547814

Version: 2017-09-08

Dedication

I am dedicating this book to Denis

for the immense help and unfailing support

he has given me over the years.

Thank you.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Anne Bennett

About the Publisher

ONE

Maeve Brannigan couldn’t believe she was actually leaving the little farm in Donegal where she’d lived all of her eighteen years. It had been worth the cajoling and pleading, her mother’s tears and her father’s bad humour that had made him moody and snappy with them all. She’d survived it all, as well as the old biddies in the parish, who’d prophesied that no good would come of it, and did she think she ought to go when, after all, she was such a grand help to her mother, for wasn’t the woman herself always saying so?

Maeve had been brought up to have manners and it had only been that innate politeness that had stopped her screaming abuse at the interfering old gossips. Did they think she didn’t know all that? She was the eldest of seven and even when Maeve had begun work in the grocery store in the town when she was fourteen, there had always been a list of chores for her at home.

Well, now it was the turn of Kate and Rosemarie, who at eleven and twelve years of age were well able for it. Maeve was sick of being at everyone’s beck and call; fed up with the isolated farm, and of the suffocating small town where everyone knew everything about you and yours. Her total social life revolved around church activities, and the weekly dance, held only in the summer months, where she met boys she’d known for years, as familiar to her as her brothers and just as exciting. Few of them had any ambition and were content to live in Ballyglen all their lives, and expected the wives they would eventually take to be satisfied with that situation too.

Maeve decided it wasn’t for her. But she wasn’t to go to Dublin, or ‘God forbid’ London, a desperate place altogether, her parents claimed, and where she knew not a soul. No, she was to go to Birmingham where Maeve’s mother, Annie, whose maiden name had been O’Toole, had a brother called Michael.

Maeve knew of her Uncle Michael, though she’d never met him. He’d been in Birmingham since early 1919, when he’d met and married his English wife, Agnes, in just a couple of months, and had never been home since. Maeve also knew that no obstacles had been put in the way of his leaving his home, but in fact the reverse. He’d served in the British Army in the Great War and had come back in late 1918, a bitter and disillusioned young man. Ireland was in disarray, the troubles at their height and rebel gangs roaming the country. His family, terrified he’d be caught up in it all, had encouraged Michael to accompany a neighbour catching the emigrant boat for England. He’d ended up in Birmingham and had got a job – a grand job he’d said, in a foundry. But he was still Annie’s little brother and she wrote him regular letters of the family, and now was sure Maeve could lodge with him to see how she liked the place. In fact Michael had written her a very long, encouraging letter. Not only could she stay with them and welcome, he said, he could even get her a waitressing job in a café. He knew the owner, a Greek man by the name of Dolamartis, a good Catholic, and they went to the same church. He’d told Michael his assistant was leaving. Jobs were hard to find, her uncle said, and Maeve couldn’t afford to be too choosy. Maeve had no intention of being choosy at all and at the mention of a job and place to stay, her parents’ resistance finally crumbled. Maeve was on her way.

They were all there that early spring morning with the mist still swirling around the hills, to put her on the little rail bus that ran at the bottom of Thomas Brannigan’s farm, to start the first leg of her long journey. She saw her mother holding little Nuala’s hand and dabbing at her eyes with her apron, her father, his face still in stiff lines of disapproval, and the others staring at her as if they couldn’t quite believe she was going. Maeve knew her father didn’t want her to go, in fact he dreaded it, and in a way she understood why. She knew she had a special place in her father’s heart, partly because she looked so like her mother and also because she was the firstborn. She also knew it had been her mother who’d persuaded her father to allow her to go, and if she hadn’t supported her, it would have been far more difficult.

The way he’d gone on, it was as if he expected her to be leapt on by every man in Christendom as soon as she left the farm. She knew the lads all had an eye for her; she wasn’t stupid. But her mother had talked to her, and anyway, she knew right from wrong. So though she felt sorry for her parents, she couldn’t wait to be gone.

Maeve watched until the group by the farm gate had become like small dots and then she settled into her seat with a sigh of contentment. Excitement fizzed inside her so that she could hardly sit still. She wished she could snap her fingers and be in Birmingham, where she was sure everything that was good awaited her.

She sustained the excitement all the way to Belfast, though the size and noise of the station unnerved her. The clatter of the enormous trains that seemed to hurl into the station to stop with a hiss of steam and a piercing screech and a whistle made her jump more than once. She left the busy Belfast station for the ferry, feeling apprehensive about the journey across the water.

Maeve boarded with what seemed like thousands of other people crowding on to the gangplank, her case bumping against her knees. Once on board, she made her way on to the deck and, putting her case beside her, she held tightly to the rail as she watched the shores of Ireland fade into the distance and then disappear altogether. She felt quite suddenly unexpectedly desolate and a little frightened. The overcast leaden grey skies belied the fact that it was early April and although it was midmorning the light was as poor as dusk, which didn’t help Maeve’s mood. Nor did the roll of the ship and the churning of her stomach.

She leant over the side, overcome suddenly by nausea, and vomited all she’d eaten that morning into the white-fringed grey water crashing and foaming against the ferry’s sides. She continued to retch over and over and she realised she wasn’t the only one.

When eventually her nausea was over and as she wiped her mouth with a handkerchief she became aware of a dumpy little woman dressed in black watching her. The rain came then, not soft spring rain, but sharp shafts that stung Maeve’s face and soaked her coat in minutes.

‘Come away into the bar,’ the woman told her, lifting her case as if it weighed nothing at all. ‘You’ll freeze to death out here.’

Maeve allowed herself to be led indoors, where she was met by a cacophony of people talking, laughing, shouting and quarrelling, and here and there she heard snatches of songs, the laments of the emigrant Irish that brought tears to her eyes.

‘Tch tch, that won’t do,’ the woman said. ‘You need a brandy to buck you up. I’ll send my Sean to get you one.’

Maeve’s protests were waved aside and the woman escorted her to where a man also dressed in black sat on a suitcase just a little way from the bar.

‘Sit down,’ the woman commanded and, as the seats were all occupied, Maeve upended her case and sat on that.

The woman introduced herself as Minnie O’Rourke, and her husband, whom she dispatched for the drinks, as Sean. They were returning from a funeral for Sean’s parents, who’d died within days of one another on the family farm in Galway. The farm now belonged to Sean, Minnie O’Rourke explained, though his three sisters ran the place. Maeve, having told her new acquaintance her own name, smiled politely and hoped the brandy would ease the cramps in her stomach.

The bar reminded her of Donovan’s in her home town, with the tobacco stench that stung Maeve’s eyes and hung like a blue fog over the room, together with the familiar smell of Guinness. Sean O’Rourke returned with two glasses of the black drink with the creamy white top for himself and his wife, and a large brandy in a balloon glass for Maeve.

Maeve looked at it fearfully. Never had she had any strong drink, except the odd sip of her father’s Guinness, which he’d allowed her at Christmas and which she’d not liked. The brandy caught in her throat and caused her to cough and splutter, and Minnie O’Rourke patted her back and with a smile told her to treat the drink with respect and sip it.

And Maeve did sip it, grimacing at the taste as one might at foul-smelling medicine that promises to do some good, but she did like the warm glow that the brandy induced.

‘That’s brought the colour back to your cheeks anyway,’ Minnie O’Rourke told her. ‘Where are you bound for?’

‘Birmingham,’ Maeve said. ‘To my uncle’s place.’

‘Well, isn’t that good news?’ Minnie exclaimed. ‘We’re going to Birmingham too. We have a fine house in Erdington. You’d best come along with us. It’s desperate altogether travelling on your own.’

And Maeve was glad to have their company. It might stop her feeling fearful that she was making some dreadful mistake. She was also anxious to learn as much as she could about the city she was going to.

‘Are you having a holiday?’ Minnie asked.

‘No,’ Maeve said. ‘I’m staying there. My uncle has got me a job in a café, near a place called Aston Cross.’

‘My! You’re lucky,’ Minnie said, ‘for God knows, jobs are few and far between at the moment, with the slump after the war, you know?’ Without waiting for a reply she went on, ‘My Sean had to have his gaffer’s word that he’d have a job to go back to, or we wouldn’t have been able to go to the funeral at all. Even then we could only take three days. His sisters wanted him to take three or four weeks, but we daren’t, and he’s a skilled man. He works in the brass industry.’

Maeve made no reply to this, for she was suddenly unaccountably weary and her head swam with the unaccustomed brandy on her empty and very sore stomach.

‘Still and all, you have a job to go to, that’s something,’ Minnie went on.

‘He knows the owner of the place,’ Maeve said.

‘That would be the way of it, right enough,’ Minnie said. ‘As I always say, God’s good.’

Maeve opened her mouth to make some sort of reply, but all that came out was a large yawn.

‘My, my,’ said Minnie. ‘You’re dead beat, so you are, and no wonder after you being so sick and all. Lie yourself down across the cases and have a wee sleep, why don’t you?’

What a relief it was, Maeve found, to lay her swimming head down, even across the lumpy hard cases, and pull up her legs to ease the cramps and close her eyes to ease the throbbing pain in her head. In minutes she was fast asleep.

She slept till the ferry docked. The O’Rourkes shook her awake and took her in hand, and she shambled behind them in the damp rain-soaked air, pushing her case before her as people thronged the decks in the rush to embark. They were waved through the customs sheds and into the noisy station in Liverpool that was teeming with people. Not that Maeve saw much of it, for the train was in and the O’Rourkes, seasoned travellers that they were, steered Maeve quickly through the crowds and on to the train to make sure of a seat, and Maeve was glad they had when she saw many passengers filling the corridors later, sitting astride their cases.

She was glad that on dry land once more she was feeling much better and able to face the picnic her mother had packed with such loving care early that morning. She shared it with Sean and Minnie O’Rourke while she plied them with questions about the city she was to live in. And as the train chugged its way southwards, they told her of Birmingham’s cinemas and dance halls, which opened all year round. They described the music halls and the Bull Ring, a huge shopping centre where great entertainment could be had, they said, on a Saturday night. Maeve was no longer nervous; instead she was in a fever of excitement to get to her uncle’s house and begin her job. Then, she was sure, her life would take an up-turn.

When Maeve and the O’Rourkes finally alighted at New Street station, Maeve wondered if she’d ever find her uncle in such a loud and busy place. All around her was the noise of people. Porters pushing laden trolleys were yelling out warning to anyone in their way, and at a newsstand, a vendor shouted his wares, while beside her the gigantic train was giving little pants of steam, as if it were an untamed animal out of breath.

Her Uncle Michael told her afterwards he’d have recognised her anywhere from the one photograph she’d ever had taken, which she’d sent to him. He’d said the photo didn’t do her justice and he’d commented on how like his sister Annie Maeve was. He could remember how stunning his sister had been at Maeve’s age, and how she’d had the pick of the local suitors. He could see that Maeve had the same-shape face with the high cheekbones, blue eyes, straight nose and full mouth. They even had the same way of holding their heads and once had had the same-colour hair, but Maeve’s mother’s blonde locks were now peppered with grey. She wore it in a bun on the back of her neck and for the journey Maeve had copied her, feeling the style made her look more adult.

Maeve was pleased and relieved at her uncle’s warm greeting. He pushed her extended hand aside and enveloped her in a big hug. His coat was scratchy and smelt of greasy dirt with a hint of tobacco, but none of that mattered. Maeve felt she was with one of her own, and tears of exhaustion and emotion welled up in her eyes. Not that she let them fall. This was her great adventure just beginning – no time for crying and carrying on, she told herself sternly.

She wiped her eyes surreptitiously and turned to the O’Rourkes, who were looking on in satisfaction at the respectable uncle, whom they thought a very suitable man indeed to look after the young Maeve Brannigan.

Michael shook hands with the two people that his niece had introduced him to, and thanked them sincerely for keeping her company. Maeve felt sorry to see them go, but had little time to dwell on it. Her uncle picked up her case and, holding her by the arm, he led her from the station.

She was shocked at the mean little streets, the houses pushed together, that her uncle took her through, after they’d alighted from the clanking swaying tram, which had frightened the life out of her. It wasn’t at all what she’d expected. They alighted at a road called Bristol Street and her uncle turned from there into Belgrave Road and then into Varna Road, which ran off it.

‘Here we are,’ he said suddenly, stopping outside one of the doorways. ‘Come away in and meet the family.’

Aunt Agnes, Michael’s wife, had once been a pretty girl. She still had classic good looks, high cheekbones like Maeve’s own, and deep-set dark brown eyes, with a well-formed nose and a full sensual mouth, and her brown hair fell in natural waves to her shoulders. But Agnes had always been easily offended and upset, and over the years her mouth had become petulant and surly. There was a hard glint in her beautiful eyes, as she’d wanted this niece of her husband’s in her home less than she wanted to fly to the moon.

Maeve smiled, but the words of gratitude that sprang to her lips were stilled by the cold stare and compressed lips of her aunt. Behind her, her uncle was bustling as, she was to learn, he did all the time he was in the presence of his wife. He rubbed his hands together as if he was going to receive a rare and wonderful gift as he said, ‘Aggie, Agnes, this is Maeve.’ As if, Maeve thought, she could be anyone else.

Agnes made no response whatsoever. Afterwards, Maeve was to think the insult had been as bad as if she’d spat on her or ordered her from the house. Suddenly the room seemed to grow chilly. Maeve didn’t know how to respond, and neither did her uncle, she realised. He turned his attention to the two children who were sitting playing snap on the rug placed in front of the hearth.

‘Away out of that, Billy and Jane. Have you not a word of welcome for your cousin?’

The children got to their feet reluctantly. They knew the young girl before them was the one their parents had argued long and hard about. In that house, it was often hard to know whether it was better to please their mother or their father. It was impossible to have a situation that would please the two of them.

‘Hello,’ Billy said.

It was a lacklustre greeting, and Billy saw his father frown on him. He didn’t care much. His father’s hands might be harder than his mother’s, but he never used them on him, whereas his mother . . .

Jane was older than her brother and thought this welcome was a shame for the girl. Her dad had said Maeve was eighteen, but Jane thought she didn’t look it, so she smiled and said, ‘Hello, I’m Jane. D’you want me to help you take your things up to the attic where you’ll be sleeping with me and Billy?’

‘That would be nice,’ Maeve said awkwardly, not sure whether this was the right response or not. She glanced across at her uncle, who nodded at her and she picked up her case. Jane had picked up the other bag, opened the door to the stairs that went off from the living room, and led the way.

Barely had the door closed on the girls when Maeve heard her aunt’s voice for the first time. It rose in an angry screech that she must know would be perfectly audible to them both. Maeve was to find out that in a back-to-back house, if you turned over in bed, the walls were so thin, half the street would be aware of it.

‘How long has she been foisted on us?’ Agnes demanded of her husband.

‘Agnes, we’ve discussed this.’ Though her uncle’s voice was muted, Maeve had not to strain to hear his words. ‘Till she gets on her feet, that’s all.’

‘Till she gets on her feet,’ Agnes sneered. ‘And how am I to feed her on the pittance you bring home?’

‘Surely to God we can do so for a little time. She has a job she’ll start in a few days and then she’ll pay her keep. Isn’t she my own sister’s child?’

‘Aye, and your sister has a tribe of them at home, by all accounts,’ Agnes cried. ‘Are we to fund the whole of them over here one at a time?’

Jane placed the bag on the attic floor. She was flushed with embarrassment, but no more than Maeve was herself. She knew her face must be brick red, for she felt her cheeks burn with it. She’d been going to ask the child why her mother didn’t want her there, but the answer was now apparent.

Then she heard Agnes’s voice again. ‘Are they to be hanging to your coat-tails all the days of your life? My family don’t make demands on you like this.’

‘Your family live around the doors, woman.’ Michael’s voice was loud and angry. ‘They’re never away from the place. God knows, I’ve not seen my family since the day I left.’

Jane looked at Maeve and said, ‘Mom’s worried about money. It ain’t just you, honest. See, our dad was put on short time three weeks ago.’

‘Short time?’

‘He only works three days a week, like,’ Jane explained.

Maeve sat down hard on the bed. Her uncle had never told them that, though he’d written and told her about the job in the café just before she’d left. In fact, she thought, looking around the bare attic, what he had told the Brannigans had not been totally true.

Maeve was glad that she had a bag packed with goodies from the farm, and the five-pound note her mother had pressed her to take.

‘Food will always come in useful, especially fresh stuff,’ Annie had said. ‘Though Michael will hardly need the money – him with his fine job and grand house – I’ll not have it said you’d go anywhere and not offer to pay your way. Give Michael’s wife the money and leave it up to her what she’ll do with it.’

And Maeve knew, as she sat in that attic, that both the food and the money would be welcome, for the fine job was now not so good, and the grand house had never been. The downstairs room, though, was well furnished. Two upholstered armchairs were drawn up before the fireplace and two small stools stood in one corner. There was also a drop-leaf table and four chairs with padded seats, and a matching sideboard. Even the blue-patterned linoleum was not pitted or ripped, and the rug before the fireplace looked fluffy and expensive.

So, once there had been money. Not money enough, perhaps, to lift the family out of the house that had given Maeve such a shock that day, to a better one. But there had been money enough for furnishing at least the one room. Maybe their bedroom too, for though they’d passed her uncle and aunt’s room on the first floor, Maeve wouldn’t have dared, even if Jane hadn’t been with her, to open the door and peep inside. The attic room, with its two iron bedsteads and bare boards, had not been touched much, though there were crisp white sheets and clean blankets on the beds.

‘That’s why our dad was able to meet you today, like,’ Jane said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘’Cos he’s on short time.’

And Maeve had thought he’d taken a day off because he could, because he was one of the bosses – a foreman or some such – as Michael had indicated in his letters home. There had been no preparation for a man who worked only three days a week. Suddenly she felt sorry for her Aunt Agnes. Already managing on little money, she had now to feed another mouth.

She took off her coat and hat and laid both on the bed, then picked the bag up and said to Jane, ‘I have some things here to please your mother. I think she’ll be happier when she sees them.’

It had grown quiet downstairs and though Maeve knew it was probably the uneasy silence of an argument not resolved, she was still grateful for it. She took the parcel of food downstairs and presented it to Agnes, together with the five-pound note for her keep.

The change in Agnes was swift. She pocketed the money in her apron immediately and smiled at Maeve in a belated welcoming gesture. But Maeve noticed the smile didn’t reach her eyes and she knew then that Agnes would never be a friend to her.

The meal was fine and filling enough, with the bacon and eggs and soda bread and butter from home, together with chips from the chippy that Billy had been dispatched for, and everyone tucked in with a fine appetite.

Maeve made pleasant small talk for courtesy’s sake, but still couldn’t take to her aunt, and it was obvious that her uncle was almost afraid of Agnes. Maybe he had reason, but the fact remained that the man who’d warmly welcomed Maeve at the station did not exist in this house, and that realisation saddened her. She resolved to get a place of her own as soon as possible.

The children fired questions at her about Ireland, the homestead she’d left behind and their daddy’s family, and Maeve answered them as best she could. But the journey and the emotion of the whole day had tired her out, and she was glad when it was late enough to take to her bed. She lay beside Jane, and though Jane would have liked to talk more, Maeve was too exhausted and quickly fell into a deep sleep.

After a few fraught days, during which her aunt openly showed her displeasure in having Maeve there despite the five pounds, she was glad to begin work. Maeve was no stranger to hard work and she knew what the woman had told her on the train was no lie. Work was scarce, and she’d seen men, often extremely thin, and shabbily and inadequately dressed, lolling on street corners. She knew she was lucky to get a job, and probably wouldn’t have it at all if her uncle hadn’t asked for her. She had no wish for her boss to regret his decision to employ her and didn’t quibble at the hours he asked her to work, but because they were so long she asked him to let her know if he heard of some place nearby that she could rent.

Mr Dolamartis thought this over. He’d never had such an industrious little waitress, and so beautiful too; she certainly drew the men in. But the hours were often from early morning to late night, and though she never complained, he knew sometimes Maeve had trouble getting there in time in the morning and back at night to her uncle’s house.

Above the café there was a flat, basic and small, and though Mr Dolamartis had never used it as a flat but as a storeroom, he knew he could use the room off the kitchen for storage instead, and give Maeve the chance of having a place of her own.

Maeve was thrilled. She wasn’t put off by the grime and neglect, and set to with a will to clean it all. Mr Dolamartis, amused at her industry, brought her some distemper to brighten the place up. There was a battered old sofa there already, and a table and chairs were supplied by the café. The bed was set into the wall of the living room and pulled out at night, but Maeve had no bedding, no crocks or cutlery, no curtains for the windows nor lino for the floor.

But though she’d paid over a good proportion of her wages to her Aunt Agnes, she’d kept her tips and sometimes they were sizeable. These she spent on essentials, then saved up for other household goods she wanted. She was often free in the afternoon for a few hours after lunch when Mr Dolamartis would take over. Then Maeve would usually take a tram to the city centre and stroll around the shops, enthralled by the choices available and particularly attracted to the Bull Ring, where she was able to find many of the things to make her flat more like home.

She joined organisations at the Catholic Church, St Francis’s, that she attended in Aston, in a bid to make friends with some of the younger parishioners. She’d been to the pictures and dancing with some of the young single Catholic girls on one of her rare evenings off, but she seldom went to her uncle’s house, knowing that she wouldn’t really be welcome.

TWO

Maeve met Brendan Hogan as she came out of Benediction one late summer’s evening in 1930, when she’d been in Birmingham less than six months. She thought he’d been to church too, but though he hadn’t, he didn’t enlighten her. He was struck by the beauty of the young woman and wanted to impress her, but though he never missed Mass or Communion – and certainly not confession, because that’s where all his sins were absolved – he hadn’t much truck with Benediction. He thought you could get too much of religion if you weren’t careful and, anyway, Benediction cut into his drinking time. He was actually on his way to a pub at Aston Cross, which he knew many ladies of ill repute frequented, when he bumped into the luscious golden-haired beauty who introduced herself as Maeve Brannigan. If the lovely lady wanted to believe he was a good clean-living Catholic boy, he wasn’t going to deny it.

Brendan was well muscled and handsome, with jet-black hair, a clear complexion, deep brown eyes and eyebrows that met across his broad forehead. Even the nose seemed to have little shape but sort of spread across his face, and his thick lips did not detract from his handsomeness, and Maeve Brannigan could not believe that such a man could possibly be interested in her.

But he was, and he smiled at her and said he was very pleased to meet her. He asked her name and Maeve told him without any hesitation, for she knew by the man’s voice that he was as Irish as herself and a good Catholic too, going to Benediction no less. She felt as if her heart had turned a somersault and Brendan knew he wasn’t going to walk away from this girl who attracted him so much.

‘Maybe you’d do me the honour of letting me walk you home, Miss Brannigan?’ he said, admiring to himself her soft lilting voice, and added with another smile, ‘My name is Brendan Hogan.’

Maeve was stunned. She wanted Brendan to see her home, but she wondered if she was being forward by accepting his offer. Maybe that’s how things were done in the cities? If she refused because she was afraid, then she might as well have stayed in Ireland, she told herself.

‘Thank you, Mr Hogan,’ she replied. ‘You can walk with me if you wish, but I don’t live at home. I work in Dolamartis’s café and live in the flat above it.’

Her own place, Brendan thought. This gets better and better. But he behaved impeccably, wanting to see Maeve again, and when he delivered her to the door of the café, he didn’t even kiss her. Never had the walk home appeared so short, Maeve thought regretfully, and never had she chatted in such an uninhibited way to someone she’d just met.

‘Can I see you again?’ Brendan asked, and Maeve thought her heart had stopped beating altogether.

‘Please?’ Brendan said, misinterpreting Maeve’s silence. He knew his cronies at The Bell public house wouldn’t believe this was Brendan Hogan of love-them-and-leave-them fame, but his body was on fire for Maeve Brannigan.

He was sure she wasn’t used to pubs, so their first date was to the cinema to see Charlie Chaplin. Brendan was the perfect gentleman, presenting Maeve with her first box of chocolates and taking her arm for the short walk to the Globe picture house at the junction of High Street and New Street in Aston. Maeve knew that was the entrance for the better seats. On her previous visits, when she’d gone on her own on a free afternoon, or with friends from the church, she’d bought cheap tickets from the little window in New Street. When she told Brendan this, he laughed and gave her a squeeze.

‘Only the best for my girl,’ he said.

Maeve felt dizzy. Was she really Brendan’s girl or was it just the way he talked? She began to think it meant nothing as the evening wore on, for Brendan made no move to take advantage of the dark to put his arms round her, or steal a kiss.

Never could Maeve imagine what self-control it took for Brendan to keep his arms by his sides. He scarcely watched the film because he was wondering if he’d given Maeve a good enough time for her to reward him with something else afterwards. With some girls a couple of gins did the trick, but he had an idea Maeve might be more difficult and he had no desire to frighten her off.

They left the cinema arm in arm.

‘Happy, darling?’ Brendan asked, and Maeve nodded. She was happy, she supposed; she’d laughed uproariously at Charlie Chaplin at the cinema and had been escorted there by a charming and very handsome man. But she was also confused, for the same man had said she was his girl, and just a minute before had called her darling and yet had scarcely touched her. She thought it a peculiar way of going on and she wondered if Brendan’s words meant anything at all.

It was brought home to her that they did when they got to Maeve’s door and he pulled her into his arms. His kiss made her feel weak at the knees and she responded readily to the embrace. Brendan was delighted; maybe it wouldn’t be so difficult after all. ‘Why don’t you ask me up for a nightcap, Maeve, my darling?’ he asked, raining kisses on her eyes, her cheeks and her throat till she was hardly able to think straight.

She nodded eagerly. After all, the man had given her a good night out and presented her with a box of chocolates of her very own, and it would be churlish and against all she had ever been taught to refuse him a cup of tea. She wasn’t anxious for him to leave just yet either and would love to talk some more.

It was when she realised that Brendan had neither tea nor talk on his mind that she became uneasy.

‘I’m sorry, Brendan,’ she said, pulling out of his arms with difficulty and regret. ‘I just can’t.’

Brendan was angry, but he hid it well. He told himself that Maeve was a decent girl, and he’d not met many of them, that was the trouble. She was not given to going too far on a first date. He’d just have to have patience.

‘It’s all right,’ he said.

Maeve saw the angry glint in Brendan’s eye and knew she’d put it there, but she couldn’t have gone further than they had. She’d let him touch and fondle her breasts, and that was bad enough and not something she’d ever have done if she’d been in her right mind and if Brendan’s kisses hadn’t made her dizzy and aching with longing. Well, she thought, I’ve kept my virginity, but lost my man because he’ll want no more to do with me after tonight.

But Brendan most decidedly did want to see Maeve again. She had few evenings off, though Brendan never complained about that. He had plenty of mates from the brass foundry where he worked who lived in Aston Cross and drank in the pubs there, and he’d stay there on Maeve’s evenings at work, arriving at the café at about half-past nine. Maeve closed up officially at ten, but if there were no customers she could close earlier and then all her time was devoted to Brendan. She never minded that he was drunk. After all, she reasoned, what else was there for him to do? Nor did she mind the bottles of beer he would bring to wash down the little bit of supper she would always save for him.

‘Let me stay the night, Maeve?’ he’d pleaded time and again on these nights.

Maeve’s answer was always the same: ‘Brendan, I can’t.’

‘Oh, but you can, my darling,’ Brendan said one day almost a fortnight after their first date as he caressed and fondled one of Maeve’s breasts. ‘It would be so good. You’d enjoy it.’

Maeve didn’t doubt it. Already she was allowing Brendan more liberties than she’d ever dreamt of allowing anyone and, finding it so nice, it would have been easy, so easy, to let Brendan do what he wanted. But always her mother’s face would be before her, sorrow-filled, or the disapproving visage of the parish priest, and both images had given her the strength to pull back.

‘Wouldn’t your mother worry if you didn’t go home anyway?’ she asked Brendan one evening when he was again wheedling to spend the night with her.

He gave a bellow of laughter. ‘Maeve, I’m a big boy now. My mother has no say in my life. No one has. And that’s how it should be for you. You shouldn’t worry so much about other people. You should do what feels good to you.’

But despite Brendan’s urging Maeve wouldn’t be moved. Brendan tried harder than he’d ever tried with any other girl, and on Maeve’s rare evenings off he would forgo his pleasures at the pub and take her somewhere special. They went to the cinema twice more and even to the theatre once. The highlight of that visit to the Hippodrome in Corporation Street was to see a young Lancashire lass called Gracie Fields singing wonderful stirring songs that she urged the audience to join in.

Brendan was opening up new horizons for Maeve, and she was grateful to him and said so as they made their way home.

‘How grateful?’ Brendan said. ‘I know a way you could show true gratitude.’

‘Ah, Brendan, if only I could.’

‘You can,’ Brendan said. His desire for Maeve seemed to be growing rather than diminishing. Often he had to seek consolation elsewhere after he’d left Maeve, for the limits she put on his lovemaking fuelled his frustration.

Maeve didn’t know how Brendan felt, though she hoped he truly loved her as she did him, for no one should do the kind of things they were doing to each other, and wanting to do more, unless they loved each other. The natural outcome was marriage and she waited for Brendan to ask her, knowing if he didn’t ask her soon, she’d give way to his urgings and her own body’s needs anyway and let Brendan love her as he wanted to for she’d be unable to help herself. She didn’t tell Brendan this, but he guessed a lot from the little moans and sighs she was unable to suppress.

Brendan wanted to take Maeve down the Bull Ring on a Saturday evening but she never had a Saturday free.

‘It’s hardly fair,’ he said one night as she lay in his arms.

‘It’s our busiest night. Mr Dolamartis would never agree.’

‘Bet he would if I asked him,’ Brendan said. ‘I’ll tell him he’s destroying my love life keeping you behind the counter, or over a hot stove every Saturday. It isn’t as if he doesn’t get his bloody money’s worth out of you. And he’s a right stingy bugger. I’ll have a word with him, don’t you worry.’

And Brendan had a word and Maeve thought she’d remember for ever the first sight of the Bull Ring on that Saturday evening, lit up with gas flares and looking like fairyland. The noise was tremendous – both from the people thronging the place and the vendors shouting out their wares. Brendan caught up Maeve’s hand and they ran like children down the cobbled streets of Jamaica Row.

‘Let go of me!’ she cried, laughing at him. ‘Let go!’

But though Brendan slowed down, he kept hold of her hand as they walked among the stalls, looking at the array of goods on offer. Maeve had discovered the Bull Ring on her first visit to the city centre, but she’d never seen it at night. It seemed a different place, a magical place.

She jiggled a hot potato from hand to hand as she watched a man tied in chains free himself, while others tottered on high stilts among the crowds. A bare-fist boxer was challenging the men for a fight, five pounds to be won if they beat him.

‘Shall I try?’ Brendan asked teasingly, but Maeve held him back.

‘You will not, Brendan,’ she said firmly. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

Brendan laughed at her. He’d had no intention of offering himself, but liked to see Maeve’s concern.

Maeve didn’t like the poor ragged men selling a variety of things from trays around their necks. ‘Old lags from the last war,’ Brendan told her, but he wouldn’t let Maeve dwell on their poor existence or buy their razor blades or matches. He steered her instead towards the man with the piano accordion, and they joined in with others singing the popular songs.

That evening Maeve had her first taste of whelks when Brendan bought her a dish. She wasn’t sure she really liked them, but thought they were better than the slimy jellied eels that Brendan chose.

Brendan put his arm round Maeve, amused at her delight in everything, and as she smiled up at him he felt as if he’d been hit by a sledgehammer in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t know if it was love or not, he just knew he wanted Maeve more than he’d wanted anything in his life before.

They stayed at the Bull Ring until the Salvation Army band marched in blowing bugles and trumpets, and singing hymns with great gusto. Maeve was amazed how many stood and listened and even joined in some hymns, and when the Salvation Army left, they had tramps and some of the old lags in tow.

‘Where are they taking them?’ she asked Brendan.

‘To the Citadel,’ he replied. ‘They’ll give them thick soup and bread, and try and find some of them a bed for the night.’

Maeve was moved by that. She’d never met people of different religions, or of no religion at all, before she’d come to Birmingham, but she thought those in the Salvation Army must be good, kind people and brave to go about in their strange costumes risking ridicule.

‘Come on,’ Brendan said. ‘The only one in your head should be me, my darling girl, and certainly not those down-and-outs. My throat’s as dry as dust and I want a drink.’

Maeve didn’t very much like the pub to which Brendan took her, but she quite liked the port and lemon he bought her. In fact she liked it so much she drank it down almost at once and Brendan smiled at her.

‘It’s not pop, you know. Treat it with care.’

Maeve remembered the brandy she’d had on the boat and how the Irish woman had said something similar. ‘I’m not used to alcohol,’ she said.

‘Well, that’s obvious,’ Brendan said. ‘I’ll buy you another and you sip it this time.’

Maeve did sip it, but the unaccustomed drink made her feel peculiar and a little giggly, and as they made their way to the tram, she confessed to Brendan that her head felt swimmy. Brendan was pleased; he wanted Maeve in a compliant mood that night.

The café was in darkness and there wasn’t a soul about as they stole up the stairs to Maeve’s flat, and once inside Brendan pulled Maeve on to the settee beside him. Suddenly it didn’t matter to Maeve that Brendan hadn’t asked her to marry him. He would, she was sure, in time, and until then . . . After all, he’d been so kind to her and so generous. She didn’t repel Brendan’s groping fingers, nor the kisses that she seemed to be drowning in.

But then at the last moment she pulled back and Brendan let out a howl of agony. He felt as if his crotch would explode and he knew by Maeve’s wild eyes and breathlessness that she wanted it as much as he did. No pleading would shift her, and Brendan thought of taking her by force, but knew it would destroy everything between them if he did.

But Maeve too had been shaken and was frustrated and unhappy. It was getting harder and harder to refuse Brendan when she wanted it so much herself. She’d never in her life felt the hot shafts of desire that Brendan induced in her and knew that eventually she would give in to him.

Brendan knew it too, but he didn’t know how long it could take to break Maeve from her upbringing and the moral confines of the Church, and wasn’t at all sure he could last out that long. However, despite his deep desire for Maeve, he’d had no intention on God’s earth of marrying her in the beginning.

He’d had no intention of marrying anyone. He’d never known a happy marriage – certainly his own parents’ had been no advertisement for blissful contentment. All his brothers had gone down the same road and he’d seen the lifeblood squeezed out of them with their demanding wives and houses full of screaming brats. He had no use for children.

He was the eldest in his family and each child his mother had had after him had meant less attention for himself. He’d felt further and further pushed away as the younger ones got what care and love there might be, though there was precious little of either.

There had been no time at all for his father either. His mother just seemed to regard him as a walking pay packet. She’d never been satisfied with the amount he’d given her every Friday night. Small wonder, Brendan thought, his father had felt the need to smack her about now and then. Brendan had certainly seen no harm in it. She was a moaning bloody nag, like most women, and he agreed with his father that they all needed teaching a lesson a time or two. A man had to be master in his own house.

He’d decided long ago that he’d share his money with no woman. He worked for it and he’d choose how it was to be spent. Brendan was the only one left at home. His mother cooked his meals and washed and ironed for him, and he paid keep, which she was always bloody grateful for. He always had enough left to buy as many fags as he wanted, a bellyful of beer as often as he liked and to place a bet if he had the mind to. He thought his brothers fools and saw marriage as a trap.

He didn’t live like a monk either. He had plenty of money to jingle in his pocket and buy drinks for those willing to please him, and he found there were women enough to accommodate him if he was that way inclined. He used to boast he’d never had to pay for sex. After a good night out most were only too grateful for a bit of slap and tickle, and Brendan always admitted to it later in confession and got absolution. He saw no reason for his life to change. That was until he met Maeve Brannigan.

That night, with his whole body on fire, he faced the fact that to have Maeve he had to marry her, for his need for her had got between him and his reason. And so he proposed.

Maeve was ecstatic that the man she adored, loved more than life itself, had asked her to marry him and soon they could love each other totally and fully as they both longed to.

However, Maeve’s parents didn’t want their daughter marrying a man they’d never seen, especially as she was under age. In desperation, Maeve turned to her uncle. Michael knew Brendan, had known him for years because they attended the same church and drank in the same pub when Michael ever had the money and Aggie’s permission to do so. He thought Brendan Hogan a grand man altogether, but because Maeve seldom went near them he had not been aware that his niece was even seeing him.

He knew Brendan had a bit of a reputation with a certain type of woman, but he told himself there was no harm in that – many young men sowed their wild oats until they met the girl they wanted to marry. He wrote and told Maeve’s parents Brendan was a good fellow altogether and would make Maeve a grand husband, and wasn’t he not only a good Catholic, but as Irish as themselves and from County Clare? Reassured and relieved they gave their blessing.

Brendan knew there were ways of preventing pregnancies, for at the pubs he’d met many old lags, veterans of the Great War, who had told him about it. Not that the rubber sheaths they wore were necessarily to prevent pregnancy, but rather the clap that the French prostitutes seemed riddled with. But they would prevent pregnancy too, and that’s what he was interested in. He wanted Maeve all to himself and not just for the tiny morsels of time that were all she’d have left for him if she had a houseful of weans to attend to.

But when Brendan went to see the priest before the wedding, Father Trelawney was shocked that he should even consider such a thing. Didn’t Brendan realise that it was totally against the Church’s teaching? Didn’t Brendan appreciate each child was a gift from God?

Chastened and resigned, Brendan married his Maeve in late October 1930 at St Catherine’s Church where he and his family worshipped. Maeve was coming up to nineteen. Her white wedding dress and the bridesmaid dress for her cousin, Jane, were paid for by her parents, and the wedding breakfast was paid for by Brendan’s parents. They said they were glad to get him off their hands and especially to one of their own. ‘Sure, didn’t we think he’d be hanging round our necks for years?’ his mother, Lily, said.

At first Maeve and Brendan were blissfully happy. For Brendan, little had changed except that now when he tottered home from the pub, he had a nice spot of sex thrown in after supper, and Maeve was always as eager as he was. Maeve waited on him hand and foot, much as his mother had done, and took joy in doing so, for she loved him very much.

Brendan had a good, well-paid job at Samuel Heath and Sons, the brass works in Leopold Street. Maeve considered them both very lucky with so many out of work at that time. When Brendan told her where he worked Maeve remembered the couple that had been kind to her on the ferry when she’d been so sick. That man had said he was a brass worker too. It seemed like a lucky omen that her husband worked in the same industry.

Mr Dolamartis was loath to let Maeve go and said he had no objection to her continuing work after her marriage. The flat was cramped for the two of them, but Brendan’s mother said that many couples started on worse, and Maeve knew she spoke the truth.

Maeve was delighted to find herself pregnant when she and Brendan had been married six months. In her brief but passionate courtship, the subject of children had never been discussed. She’d barely noticed his indifference to any references she’d made to her brothers and sisters back home in Ireland. She’d met none of his nieces and nephews till the wedding and there had been virtually no contact since because Maeve worked such long and unsociable hours.

She’d always presumed the natural progression in marriage was children. She longed to be a mother and hold Brendan’s child in her arms, and thought he would be equally pleased. But Brendan raved and shouted, telling her she was a stupid cow and the pregnancy was all her fault, and when, in tears because of the onslaught and not at all sure what she had done to deserve it, she remonstrated with him, he punched her in the face. Maeve gave a cry of alarm and put her hand up to ward off further blows, and tasted blood in her mouth.

Brendan saw the pleasant life they’d been enjoying slipping away from them. Like his father’s, his life would turn sour and he’d have a child every bloody year bleeding him dry. He suddenly felt so hopeless about the future that he’d lashed out at Maeve.

Now he couldn’t look at her bloodstained face; he couldn’t believe he’d done that to his lovely beautiful Maeve. He went off to the pub, knowing his brothers would make fun of him when he told them the news and remind him they’d told him not to bother getting married. God, they’d say, hadn’t he the life of Riley already? Just at that moment Brendan thought life was a bloody bitch and women the biggest bitches of all. Temptresses all of them, and Maeve no better than the rest.

Despite his brothers’ taunts that evening, Brendan was bitterly ashamed of himself for what he had done. He thought about it all night and apologised to Maeve the next day. He told her he loved her and said he’d been shocked by the news that he was going to be a father and he’d lashed out in frustration. He said it hadn’t been how they’d planned things. Maeve knew it hadn’t, but thought Brendan must have known the passionate lovemaking they indulged in so often would eventually result in a baby. But she didn’t blame her husband, feeling that in some way it must have been partly her fault, so she kissed him and told him that it was all right, confident that it wouldn’t happen again.

Yet as her pregnancy had continued, Brendan often clouted Maeve, usually after he’d been drinking. She was far too ashamed to tell anyone about it and always thought up an excuse to explain the bruises that could be seen. And Brendan was always so sorry afterwards, full of remorse. Anyway, she thought, she must be at least partly to blame because Brendan was not the same man she’d courted or the same as he’d been in the early months of their marriage and she felt ashamed and saddened. Maeve would always forgive him and believe him when he assured her it wouldn’t happen again.

As the birth got closer, Maeve knew she’d have to give up her job and therefore the flat too. Everyone was keeping an eye out for a place for them, and when she heard of the vacant back-to-back house in a court off Latimer Street in the Horse Fair, she’d been delighted. She was seven months pregnant then and felt the new house would be a fresh start for them both.

She told herself it was probably the cramped conditions of the flat getting to Brendan, causing him to hit out. His mother, Lily, though Maeve had not breathed a word of Brendan’s violence towards her, said any man would be annoyed to see his wife working the hours Maeve did. ‘You should be at home, dear,’ she said, ‘looking after your man properly.’ Maeve immediately felt guilty that she’d been neglecting her husband and resolved to try harder to be a model wife.

Mr Dolamartis, in a fit of generosity at losing Maeve, had found her a second-hand gas cooker and a fellow to fit it in her new home, and Maeve had been thrilled with it. However, money was tighter than ever, for not only were Maeve’s wages lost, but now they had to find the rent and money for the gas meter for the cooker and the lamps, and for coal too, for they moved in the middle of September and the evenings were often chilly.

Added to that, there were things to buy for the baby. The food bills had increased too, now that they couldn’t be supplemented by café fare, and Brendan in consequence had to part with more of his wages. No longer were there tempting suppers for him when he got home from the pub. Sometimes, indeed, there was nothing at all, not that he had that much money to spend in the pub either.

Elsie Phillips, who lived in the house adjoining Maeve’s, had been a tower of strength to her since she’d moved in. Maeve was glad of it, for since the move Brendan had become morose and moody, and often snapped at Maeve for very little. Without Elsie Maeve would have been depressed by the whole situation.

Elsie was very fond of Maeve. She and her husband, Alf, had never had children. Early in their marriage it hadn’t mattered much, for Elsie had her hands full with her mother, who after years of caring for her husband, who had TB, eventually became ill herself with a tumour in the stomach.

Elsie tended to her mother in a bed brought downstairs and her father coughing his guts up in the bedroom above. She and Alf had the attic and she often wondered how she’d cope if she became pregnant, and at the time thanked God that she hadn’t. Two years later, all that she had of her parents were the two wooden crosses in the churchyard. After they’d been married for seven more childless years, Elsie mentioned to Alf that perhaps they should see the doctor, but Alf said he was reluctant to discuss anything so personal. The priest Elsie went to for advice told her she had to be content with whatever God sent and if he intended her to be childless then she had to be satisfied with it. She hadn’t ever been satisfied, but as she was unable to change the situation she had to accept it.

But when a heavily pregnant Maeve Hogan moved in next door to her some years later, Elsie’s maternal instincts rose to the fore. Maeve was only nineteen, her twentieth birthday being in late December, and could have been Elsie’s own daughter. Maeve, often confused and made unhappy by Brendan’s behaviour, and missing her own mother, found Elsie’s company very welcome indeed.

A strong friendship grew between them, and it had been Elsie’s hand that Maeve had clung to as her son, Kevin, was born in November 1931, while Brendan went on a drinking binge and disappeared for two days. He returned looking like death, without a word of explanation or apology and took no notice of his infant son.

In fact Brendan’s indifference towards Kevin seemed to be echoed among all his family, and even Maeve’s uncle and aunt. Letters of congratulation from Ireland were all well and good, but not the same as her family visiting and taking delight in the child. So Maeve was glad of Elsie’s support. She knew she’d get little from Brendan and she thanked God that she had such a kind and caring neighbour.

THREE

Brendan hated the child who’d supplanted him. One day, being unused to the demands of a young baby, Maeve hadn’t quite finished feeding Kevin when Brendan walked in the door. He watched his son tugging at his wife’s breasts and was so consumed by jealousy that he shook.

He strode across the room and dragged the child so roughly from Maeve that he began to wail, and Maeve got to her feet, terrified Brendan would hurt him. Not that he didn’t want to, for he knew Maeve preferred the child over him. But in the end he almost threw him back to Maeve and told her to put him in the bedroom out of the bloody road.

Another night he came home to find no dinner ready because, she said, ‘the baby wouldn’t settle’. The resultant punch he gave her was to make sure that that never happened again.

‘You look after me before any squalling brat,’ he yelled, as Maeve wiped the blood oozing from her nose and her split lip. ‘Maybe you’ll remember that in future.’

No longer was Maeve so eager for him each night either, and would often turn from him if Kevin made a murmur, holding the baby in her arms and crooning while her husband grew hot with impatience and frustration. He never spoke of his feelings and fears, but instead grew moodier than ever, and often gave Maeve the odd punch or clout if he felt she was annoying him in some way.

Maeve didn’t really understand what had happened to the husband that she still loved, who’d courted her with such consideration and professed his devotion to her often. She sometimes remembered with a pang of nostalgia how they used to laugh together over something silly, or the hours and hours they used to talk and never tire of one another, or the way she used to yearn for his hands on her body. Now such intimacy seemed to have slunk away from them.

Brendan worked hard, there was no denying that, and in the early days of their marriage he’d talked about his work and the sweltering heat he toiled under, turning copper and zinc into molten metal in white-hot furnaces so that they could be poured into crucibles. The sweat ran from him so freely that often the shirt he wore was still damp when he arrived home.

Maeve had witnessed the weariness on his face when he came in the door and saw the lines on his brow rimed with dirt, and the grime streaking his cheeks. She’d seen his cracked, calloused hands encrusted with black, and smelt the sour sweat of him. She’d often felt sorry for him, and because of it, had forgiven him his temper.

Then she’d always had the kettle on the boil for Brendan’s wash. He said he always felt better with the muck sluiced off him and clean, dry clothes on, but since Kevin’s birth all that had stopped. Now he was prepared to sit down at the table unwashed, reeking from stale sweat and with filthy hands and nails, and would shovel in his food as though he was a pig at a trough.

Because Maeve knew beer inflamed Brendan’s temper, she tried talking to him after his meal when he was more rational and at least sober. She tried, as she’d done before, asking him what she was doing that so enraged him that he felt he had to raise his hand to her. Brendan never had an answer to give her. He felt she needed no explanation and the fact that she seemed to expect one angered him further. His mother would never have questioned his father.

When she tried to talk to him about the money he gave her, which was woefully inadequate, Brendan flew into such a temper Maeve was terrified. She produced a list of things she had to buy, or pay for each week, thinking it might help, and he tore it from her hands, ripped it into pieces and threw them into the fire.

The back of his hand sliced across Maeve’s cheek as he hissed, ‘All the bloody same, women, nag, nag, nag, and always about bloody money. Well, you’ll just have to manage on what I give you, for you’ll get no more.’

Maeve had been stunned by both the blow and Brendan’s reaction. After that she didn’t say anything more to him about the son of whom he seemed to take no notice. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Elsie Phillips next door, who took as much delight in the child as she did herself, Maeve might have become seriously depressed.

It was Elsie’s advice that Maeve sought one sunny morning in September 1932. Elsie listened and then said, ‘You’ll have to tell him, girl. For God’s sake, pregnancy is one thing you can’t hide.’

‘Elsie, I’m scared.’

‘It’s his baby as much as yours, Maeve. You didn’t do it on your own.’

‘You don’t know him, Elsie. He’ll go mad.’

‘Better you tell him than let him find out for himself,’ Elsie said. But she spoke cautiously because she’d known for some time that Maeve’s husband smacked her about a bit. The construction of the houses was not conducive to any degree of privacy, and she’d heard some of the blows Maeve had received, and seen the evidence with her own eyes the next day. But Maeve had not mentioned the violence so neither had Elsie.

Still, Maeve knew Elsie was right. Brendan had to know that she was three months gone with another child. When Maeve told him that night after tea, he flew into a temper and shouted and screamed so much, Elsie was tempted to go in, but Alf told her to mind her own business. She didn’t breathe easy till she heard Maeve’s door slam and knew Brendan had taken himself off to the pub.

All evening Brendan brooded, over the many pints he ordered, on the news he’d received that day. There would be a baby every bloody year, just as he’d imagined it, till Maeve hadn’t a moment to bid him the time of day, and he hadn’t two halfpennies to call his own. Every penny would go to feed and clothe bleeding kids he had never wanted. Some bloody gift from God!

That night Brendan staggered home from the pub consumed with the unfairness of it. It was Maeve’s fault, tempting him like all women tempted men, trapping him into marriage by not letting him do what he wanted until she had the ring on her finger. Bloody bitches, all women. Maeve most of all, and it was about time she was taught a lesson she’d not forget in a hurry.

The next morning, when Brendan saw the mess he’d made of Maeve’s face and hazily remembered what he’d done to her the night before, he felt guilty and ashamed, and angry with himself for feeling that way. He told himself she’d asked for it. He growled at her to get his breakfast and, alarmed and afraid, Maeve, without a word, eased herself painfully from the bed and went to do his bidding.

She was glad when he went to work, for only then did her limbs stop trembling, but when Kevin awoke and began to cry, she groaned as she mounted the stairs, for she was stiff and sore, and every part of her seemed to ache. She wanted to hide from the world, at least until her face was back to normal, she felt so ashamed.

She finished feeding Kevin, changed him and then rocked him in her arms until his eyelids drooped and eventually closed. She laid him in the pram and went into the bedroom, where she painfully dressed herself. Then, wrapping her shawl around her head and shoulders, pulling it well over her face, she made her way to the outdoor lavatory.

Outside the autumn sun penetrated the court in dusty shafts, and small children played around the doorways. Two women stood keeping an eye on them and having a chat and both looked curiously at Maeve. She muttered a greeting, but kept her head down and hurried past.

When she returned the women had gone, though the children still played on, and she was grateful that they took no notice of her. As she reached her door, she heard Kevin’s plaintive cry, and she struggled with the latch, anxious to get in and see to him. She lost her grip on the shawl and it slipped from her just as Elsie Phillips’s door opened. She stared at Maeve’s face with a look of dismay and shock.

So she’d been right, she thought to herself. The brute had been smacking her about, but it was more than the odd slap or punch this time. ‘You poor sod,’ she said with feeling, and the sympathy started the tears in Maeve’s eyes.

She stumbled through the door, the tears almost blinding her. Elsie stood undecided, not sure whether to follow her into the house or go out to the shops, as she’d intended, and mind her own business. But then, she reminded herself, the girl had no one belonging to her, except a sour-faced old cow of an aunt. She’d seen her just the once at Kevin’s christening and couldn’t take to her, nor her milksop, henpecked husband, who seemed to think the sun shone out of Brendan Hogan’s arse.

Her mind made up, she put down her bag, took off her coat, closed her own door and went to Maeve’s. The girl still cried, even as she held the baby, and Elsie’s heart was smitten with pity for her. She knew the pattern Maeve’s life would take from now on, for she believed once a man started beating his wife he would always do so, and she also knew Maeve would not get a lot of sympathy from anyone because of it either.

She took the baby from Maeve and sat him up in the pram, where he could watch what was going on, and pressed his mother down into a chair.

‘I’m going to make us a cup of tea,’ Elsie said, ‘and then see if I can do summat about your face. After that if you need any shopping I’ll get it for you. You’ll not want to go out much for a day or two, I’d say.’

Maeve marvelled that Elsie seemed to know just how she felt and was very glad of the older woman’s presence. For the first time she didn’t feel so isolated.

Elsie had been right. Maeve’s life took on a pattern from that first real beating, the first one that Brendan hadn’t apologised for. She realised whatever she did or didn’t do, however she pleaded, begged or tried to talk to Brendan, he would treat her as he saw fit. In his eyes that was grudgingly giving her money he could spare her after his booze, fags and bets had been accounted for, however inadequate it was, and clouting her whenever he felt like it.

‘Write and tell your mother,’ Elsie advised one day in early spring 1933.

‘Tell her what?’ Maeve demanded harshly, wincing, for she was recovering from another few hefty clouts which she had been given not long after her daughter, Grace, was born on 9 February. ‘Tell her my husband doesn’t give me enough money either to feed us or keep us warm, and beats me? What the hell could she do about it, but worry herself into an early grave?’

A further worry was nagging at Maeve’s mind at this time and that was Brendan’s treatment of Kevin. The child was fifteen months old when his sister was born, no longer a wee baby to be rocked to sleep, but an active toddler.

Maeve knew Brendan had to come first in everything and she’d learnt to accept that. Maeve made dinner for him every night, even if she lived on bread and scrape herself, or sometimes nothing at all, because it was healthier to do so. And while he ate, he wanted the children out of sight, but now Kevin was not always in bed when he came in and that seemed to enrage him, even if the child was doing nothing wrong.

She tried to protect him as much as she was able, but his father often gave him a hefty slap on the legs, or a swipe across the head for no reason that Maeve could see except that he wanted to do it. Remonstrating with him and protesting that Kevin was only a wee boy did no good at all. In fact all she usually got for her efforts was a slap herself. That wouldn’t have stopped her if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was afraid to protest too much in case the child got the brunt of it and she tried to keep them apart as much as possible.

Maeve herself got used to the way life was for her. She lived day to day, interested only in getting enough to eat for herself and Kevin each day. She fed Grace herself and Elsie complained she should be eating wholesome meals to do it properly. Maeve thought that was easy to say. Now she was a regular at the pawnshop, yet the first time she’d gone there she’d nearly died of shame. Ballyglen did not sport a pawnshop or anything like it. Poor people there could apply to the St Vincent de Paul for tokens to spend in the shops for groceries only. You were considered the lowest of the low to apply to them, but often Maeve would have welcomed something to put food in her mouth and her son’s that Brendan could not convert to beer money.

The winter was the hardest, often with no money for either coal or gas, and little enough for food. They would have surely perished but for the odd shovelful of coal from Elsie, or the bit of stew or soup she said she had over. Maeve knew full well she’d done extra on purpose, but was often too hungry and dispirited to care.

‘Elsie, I can see this life stretching out before me for years and years,’ Maeve complained to her friend one day.

Elsie could see it too, but thought it wouldn’t be helpful to say so.

‘I’ve tried talking to him, but it does no good,’ Maeve went on. ‘Surely he can see how we live, what I’m left to eat, and the weans. Dear God, Elsie, if you’d known the type of man he was when we were courting, or even just married . . .’ Maeve shook her head sorrowfully. ‘He’s not the same at all.’

Elsie had heard the story more than once and she still said nothing. She did all she could for Maeve, but to go between man and wife – that was something she shrank from, and her Alf said she was not to get involved. He said Maeve had an uncle she could appeal to, or failing that she could go home to her mother.

But Elsie knew no such course was open to Maeve. On the rare occasions her uncle had braved his wife’s wrath to visit his niece, he always had his kids with him. And her predicament was hardly a subject Maeve could bring up in their hearing. Anyhow, he’d never hear a word said against Brendan and still thought him a fine figure of a man.

As for her mother, Elsie knew she’d been told nothing, for even if she had, as Maeve said, there was little she could do. Maeve wouldn’t leave Brendan unless something desperate happened altogether. She was a good Catholic girl and knew only too well that marriage was for life and you married for better or worse. Anyroad, Elsie thought, even if Maeve wanted to go to her mammy for a wee holiday, a break from the brute, how, when she barely had two halfpennies to bless herself with, would she find the money for the fare?

She didn’t bother saying any of this. Her Alf was a good man, and a good provider. He’d never lifted his hand to her all their married life, and she knew if things had been different he would have been a good father to their children. Well, that was not to be and Elsie had faced that fact years before, but she often wondered what she would have done had Maeve been her daughter.

Would she have stood by just because of some words said at an altar and watched Maeve and her children being terrorised or half starved and frozen to death? No, by God, she wouldn’t, and as Maeve hadn’t her mother and father to stand up for her Elsie was determined to do all she could.

Maeve knew she couldn’t have coped so well if it hadn’t been for Elsie. Getting the children clothes and even some for herself had been a real headache. All the baby necessities had been bought from Maeve’s wages when she worked at the café, but as the children grew problems arose. Elsie took her to jumble sales where for a few hoarded pennies she could buy jumpers and cardigans to be unravelled and knitted up again, or skirts that could be cut up to make something for the children, and then sometimes Elsie would bring a similar load from the rag market.

Maeve had been taught to sew and her mother had a treadle sewing machine similar to Elsie’s, so Maeve knew all about cutting out and tacking together for Elsie to go over seams and hemming neatly. Knitting she’d never been shown, but she soon picked it up. ‘Born of necessity,’ Maeve said when Elsie commented on the speed Maeve was able to knit after just a couple of weeks. ‘Anyway, it gives me pleasure to have the children dressed respectable. I only wish I could knit shoes like the booties they had as babies.’

Shoes were the very devil to get. There were adult shoes sometimes, and Maeve had got herself a pair at a jumble sale when her others had literally fallen off her feet, though the second-hand ones were a size too big. Any children’s shoes were, in the main, worn through, the toes kicked in or the soles hanging off.

She remembered how she’d run barefoot all through the spring and summer of her Irish childhood and delighted in it, leaping over the spring turf and never feeling the pebbles in the dusty farm tracks. She thought there wouldn’t be the same pleasure on the cobbles of the courts or the hard dirty pavements of the streets, but barefoot Kevin and little Grace often had to go.

Before school every September, Maeve and her brothers and sisters had all been fitted out with shoes. Sometimes they were handed down from an older child, but newly soled and heeled, and they all had new clothes made by their mother during the holidays. Maeve had little hope of finding a pair of shoes for each child that weren’t too worn before the cold of winter, but if she was lucky she could sometimes get a ragged pair of plimsolls, the canvas worn and ripped and with paper-thin soles that she’d line with cardboard.

The spring that Grace turned two years old and Kevin was three, Maeve again missed a second period. She was terrified of telling Brendan. She didn’t know why he appeared surprised by it and acted as if it was her fault. Surely to God he must have realised that what he did most nights was bound to lead to pregnancy in the end. She’d never complained or refused because she knew it was her duty to submit to her husband.

The little sexual forays and fondling that she’d enjoyed in courtship when she’d longed for Brendan to continue had stopped in the early months of her marriage, once she’d told him of her pregnancy. Brendan had seen no need after that to bring Maeve to the point of excitement and longing. He didn’t really expect her to enjoy it and didn’t really care whether she did or not. In the marriage service she’d promised to obey him and that’s what she had to do.

At first, again and again Maeve had responded to Brendan, each time hoping to recapture the heady romance and embraces she’d enjoyed before she’d told him she was expecting a baby. She remembered how Brendan’s fingers could touch, stroke and caress her body and send her senses reeling and a throbbing urgency she’d never felt before beginning between her legs. Oh God, how she’d wanted him to go on and on. But now she felt nothing but the sensation of Brendan’s body in the bed at night, his beery breath wafting across her and his thick tongue probing her mouth till she felt she might choke, and then he’d take her roughly and without any form of tenderness. It was, Maeve reflected, just one thing to be endured, but it had already resulted in two children, and now there was a third on the way. She no longer loved Brendan, she realised with an aching sense of loss; now she only feared the man she’d once have laid down her life for.

Another month passed and there was a definite rounding out of her stomach and Maeve knew any day Brendan would discover her pregnancy for himself. She tried to work out whether he would resent her even more for not telling him. Either way, she knew she was going to catch it.

Then one Friday night in April, with Brendan fed and sitting reading the paper with a cup of tea in his hand, Maeve began getting the children to bed. They always sat stock-still whenever their father was around and it wrung Maeve’s heart to see them sitting so silent and quiet like no children should ever be – like only petrifying fear could make them. Poor little Grace only had to hear her father’s boots ringing on the cobblestones for her to wet herself.

When Maeve got them up into the attic, unless it was the depths of winter, she’d often have a bit of a game with them – tickling them into laughter perhaps or telling them a wee story. However, that evening Maeve, having finished washing Grace, then picked her up to take her to bed. Kevin, who’d been washed first and was sitting on a cracket by the fire, got to his feet, having no wish to be left with a man who scared the living daylights out of him. In his panic to follow his mother, he stumbled over the fender, knocking against his father, causing him to tip the hot tea down his leg.

With a roar Brendan was upon the child and Kevin’s resultant shriek stopped Maeve in her tracks. But she knew whatever had happened she could do nothing with Grace in her arms. She ran up to the attic and laid her in the bed, cautioning her to stay there, then flew down the stairs. She knew Grace would stay where she was for she was a timid little thing, and no wonder, and anyway, the screams and shouts from below would frighten the most stout-hearted.

What Maeve saw when she stepped into the room nearly stopped her heart beating, for Brendan had the belt unhooked from his trousers, Kevin’s ragged underpants that he slept in pulled down, and he was whipping his little bottom. Maeve didn’t know what Kevin had done, nor did she care. Whatever it was it didn’t warrant what his father was doing to him and with an outraged scream she was upon him.

Brendan warded her off and then, totally enraged, he turned on her, the belt lashing her to right and left till she sank to the floor with a whimper. ‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ he growled as he pulled his coat from the rail behind the door and slammed his way out.

The next day, Maeve miscarried and she sent Kevin for Elsie. She looked at the stripes on her body where the belt’s end had flicked and asked, ‘Was it you telling him you were pregnant brought this on?’

‘No, not this time,’ Maeve said. ‘This time I got it protecting Kevin. This time the bloody sod didn’t even know I was pregnant.’ The tears came then, hot and scalding as she cried for herself, her children and the little baby she had lost.

Elsie held Maeve tight as she went on, her voice muffled with tears, ‘Kevin spilt his tea, that’s all. An accident, of course – he never goes near the bastard if he can help it – and for that Brendan took his belt off to him.’ She pulled herself out of the comfort of Elsie’s arms, and though the marks of tears were still on her face, her eyes were dry and wide and staring. ‘D’you hear me, Elsie?’ she demanded. ‘That child who’s little more than a baby was whipped with a belt for spilling a drop of tea.’

That was the first time Brendan used his belt on Kevin, but not the last. Maeve fought for him when she could, but she was often stopped by Brendan’s threat: ‘Come nearer or lift a hand to help him and I’ll beat him senseless.’

Maeve knew he was capable of it, for he truly seemed to detest Kevin and she was forced to watch. She thought of seeking advice at the church, but hesitated to involve the priest, Father Trelawney, who seemed anyway a great buddy of Brendan’s. Brendan said it was a father’s duty to chastise his son and Maeve was very much afraid the priest might agree.

Just before Kevin began school, Maeve miscarried again and Kevin indirectly caused that as well. Both children had caught measles, but Grace, who’d not been as ill as Kevin, was up and about while Kevin was still very poorly indeed. He lay across the chairs during the day with the curtains drawn to protect his eyes. Maeve used the rent money to pay the doctor’s bill and buy the medicine and the meat for nourishing broth to spoon into him.

That day Maeve had Brendan’s dinner cooking on the stove when Kevin began to vomit. By the time the nausea had passed and Kevin had lain back exhausted on the pillows and Maeve had wiped his face and given him a drink and taken the bowl to wash, the potatoes had stuck to the pan and the sausages were blackened.

Brendan’s rage was terrible. ‘But,’ Maeve told Elsie later, ‘he knew I was pregnant this time. I don’t know how, Elsie. He seemed to concentrate on my stomach. Anyway he’s got what he wanted, another little baby is lost.’

‘Yes,’ said Elsie grimly. Brendan seemed to be getting worse, both to Maeve and young Kevin, and Elsie was afraid for them all. She’d heard of women been killed by violent husbands and they were never brought to court for it. There was always some other cause registered on the death certificate. She wished that Maeve could get away somewhere, or else that Brendan could be run down by a tram.

In the dark of the night, Maeve, often hungry, tired and worn out trying to placate Brendan, would wonder about her life. And though she loved her children dearly and felt they were the only good thing to come out of her travesty of a marriage, she longed sometimes to be able to turn the clock back. She wished she could return to the cosy farmhouse where no one threatened another. Her father had never raised his hand to her, or any of her sisters. Annie had always said his hands were too hard and he might hurt them too much. Dear God, Maeve thought, if he only saw me now. He’d murder Brendan for laying a hand on me, let alone wee Kevin.

But Maeve didn’t tell them – couldn’t tell them. She wrote about the children and how they were and what they were doing, glad her mother could not see their pinched, impoverished faces, their patched, darned and ragged clothes and often bare feet. She told her of the miscarriages, needing sympathy, for Brendan had given her none. The first time he’d been surprised to find her in bed and Elsie in charge of his tea, for he’d not known of Maeve’s pregnancy, but he’d said little about it except to tell Maeve it was probably all to the good since the two they had were enough to rear.

Maeve had turned her head away, too miserable to say anything. But the second time, she’d turned on him angrily. ‘Are you satisfied now, you bloody brute?’ she’d cried. ‘Are you going to beat any child I’m expecting out of me? Dear God, Brendan, I hope your conscience is clear enough for you to sleep at night.’

She got a slap for her outburst, but it had been worth it to see how shocked he’d been that she’d actually answered him back.

Her mother, though, sent her back encouraging little letters that made her cry. She wrote as she spoke and the hurt she felt on Maeve’s losses was genuine. It was as if she reached across the water to her and Maeve missed her more than ever.

In January 1936, George V died at Sandringham, and it was supposed his eldest son, the popular Edward, would succeed him, though it was rumoured that he was having an affair with a divorcee, Wallis Simpson.

‘Can’t have her as Queen,’ Elsie commented, ‘not a divorcee.’

‘Why?’ Maeve asked. ‘It’s only the Catholic Church that doesn’t recognise divorce.’

‘Aye, but he’s the head of the Church of England, isn’t he, the King?’ Elsie said. ‘No. Can’t have him on the throne and then marry her.’

It seemed Elsie was right, for, as the days passed, there was no news of a coronation. ‘I’d not want the crown at the moment anyroad,’ Elsie said. ‘The world’s a dicey place and I think the whole thing’s going to blow up in our face. I’d not want to be in the government or the Royal Family just now. I mean, look at them Germans again.’

Maeve nodded. Some dreadful tales were coming out of that country, things they’d done to the Jews that it was hard to believe. ‘Warmongers, that’s what Germans are,’ Elsie said. ‘Mark my words there’ll be trouble. Why else are they building up their armies and that?’

Maeve couldn’t answer her. Just a couple of years before, Hitler had been made Führer of Germany and conscription was brought in. Not the action of a peaceful country, surely?

Brendan said it wouldn’t affect them anyway. ‘It’ll probably come to nothing,’ he said. ‘Germany was soundly beaten last time. They’ll hardly come back for more.’

‘What about the things people say they’re doing to the Jews?’

Brendan shrugged. ‘We’re not Jews – what do we care?’ he said indifferently. ‘Things just as bad have been done to Catholics in the past.’

Maeve knew Brendan was right, but she didn’t think that just because atrocities were committed against one group in the past they should be tolerated against another group now. But surely, surely it wouldn’t come to war. The First World War was supposed to be the war to end all wars and over ten million had died to make sure it was. No country could want that carnage again; they wouldn’t be that stupid.

Even when civil war broke out in Spain in July few Britons were bothered. What was Spain anyway? It was nothing to do with them. France and Britain were right to agree to a policy of nonintervention. But when news came that Hitler’s armies and those of Italy under Mussolini were being sent to help Franco, the military dictator, two thousand British people joined the International Brigade on the side of the Republicans and sailed for Spain.

‘Bloody fools,’ Brendan declared. ‘It isn’t their fight.’

‘Maybe they have a conscience,’ Maeve retorted, angry with him because he had given Kevin a sound spanking for dropping a cup and breaking it. ‘That’s something you don’t seem to have.’

Brendan grabbed Maeve’s cheeks and squeezed them between his large muscular fingers. ‘Watch that lip,’ he said, ‘or I just might split it open for you.’

‘Oh Brendan, leave me alone,’ Maeve said wearily, jerking her head away. ‘Leave us all alone, please, can’t you?’

‘Aye, I can,’ Brendan said with a humourless laugh. ‘But maybe I don’t want to.’

And that, thought Maeve, is the truth of it. He enjoys tormenting us.

But the international situation was more unsettling than Brendan’s attitude, for wasn’t she used to that? She listened to it on the new wireless with its accumulator, which Elsie and Alf had bought themselves, and knew that war clouds were gathering all around them.

Kevin began St Catherine’s School the September before his fifth birthday. To Maeve’s shame and distress, he had no shoes and his clothes were darned and ragged, but she couldn’t even scrape up the coppers to buy better second-hand stuff. She was behind again with the rent and knew if some of the arrears weren’t paid off she’d be out in the street.

Kevin wasn’t the only barefoot or badly shod child at the school, and in October a man came to see them from the Birmingham Mail Christmas Tree Fund. Kevin came home a few days later clutching not only a pair of new boots stamped so they couldn’t be pawned, and a pair of socks to go with them, but also a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a navy jumper and shirt. Maeve was glad of the decent warm clothing, but mortified that she was unable to provide them herself, especially when she knew her husband was in full-time work for which he was paid a living wage.

What made it worse were the two hundred men who’d marched from Jarrow in the northeast of England, where unemployment stood at sixty-eight per cent. They were demanding jobs and had marched to London with a petition, but the Prime Minister refused even to see or to speak to them.

Maeve felt she could have accepted her poverty better if Brendan had been unemployed and they’d had to exist on dole money. She’d read somewhere that the average family of husband, wife and two children needed six pounds a week to keep them above the poverty line. She knew many earned much less than that, but she was pretty certain that Brendan earned that much and more, for his job was skilled. But she was lucky if she saw the odd pound of it, and while her husband seemed to have money to do as he pleased, the rest of the family were definitely in poverty.

As the year drew to a close, Edward, the uncrowned King, abdicated. He said he ‘found it impossible . . . to discharge my duties as King . . . without the help and support of the woman I love.’

Everyone was shocked at what he had done. ‘Love, my arse,’ Elsie said angrily. ‘What’s he playing at? He’s the King and that should come first. As my mother would say, love flies out the window when the bills come in the door.’

‘Well, that would hardly apply to them, would it, Elsie?’ Maeve said with a laugh, amazed that her friend should care so much.

But most people had an opinion on the abdication and she found it was discussed everywhere. But however anyone felt, by 12 December 1936 Britain had a new King – Prince Albert, who would be known as George VI. He’d married a lady called Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who would be Queen, and he had two daughters. The elder, Elizabeth, who was then ten years old, was now heir to the throne.

Maeve listened to it all on Elsie’s wireless and later read about it in the paper, but all in all she felt nothing in her situation was likely to change, whichever King was on the throne, and she looked forward with little enthusiasm to 1937.

FOUR

‘Terrible world to bring kids up in, this,’ Elsie said to Maeve one day in the spring of 1938. She was eyeing Maeve’s swollen stomach as she spoke, because Maeve was six months gone again and when she’d told Brendan about it she’d borne the marks for almost a week. Still, he’d more or less left her alone after that. This was one at least she hadn’t miscarried. And there was nothing to be gained by going on about it. The world was a dangerous enough place with enough to worry about, God alone knew. Elsie often thought it was as if the whole globe was like a tinderbox and ready to go up at any time. ‘I mean, bloody civil war still going on in Spain,’ she said. ‘And that bloody Hitler and Mussolini like bosom buddies and now the Nips attacking the Chinese.’

‘Yes, but none of it affects us,’ Maeve said, ‘not really. I mean, it’s all happening miles away.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ Elsie countered. ‘If you ask me, girl, we’re teetering on the edge of war.’

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.

‘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.’

Home! Just to say the word lifted her spirits, and she pushed her small son through the door, laughing gently at his disgruntled face.

There was no one about but Elsie to bid the family farewell. It was that hour in the morning when few women would be around; those husbands still in work would have left and the women would be busy organising their families for the day, and Maeve was glad of it.

She and Elsie clung to one another, though they weren’t in the habit of it, and when they drew apart there were tears in both women’s eyes.

‘Write to me?’ Elsie urged, and as Maeve nodded she asked, ‘You have let your family know you’re coming?’

‘Aye,’ Maeve said, but she didn’t say she’d left sending the letter till the day before. It would arrive that morning and it would be too late for her mother to tell her not to come. She didn’t expect a rapturous welcome in the farmhouse in Donegal, for her mother would never countenance a woman leaving her husband. She’d said a novena to the Blessed Virgin that she’d be able to convince her mother that she had a justifiable cause for walking out on Brendan Hogan. Anyway, that was it! She’d burnt her boats now right enough.

She straightened her shoulders, hoisted up her case, bid Elsie goodbye and walked down the street with a child each side of her.

FIVE

The children loved the train, as Maeve knew they would, and they ate their jam sandwiches, washed down with the pop from the cracked cups, almost as soon as they were settled. They were enchanted by the countryside they passed through. Now and again cows stared nervously at them over farm gates and sheep on the hillsides tugged on the grass relentlessly. Maeve told them the names of the animals and of the crops growing that they’d never seen before.

By the time the train reached Liverpool, both children were beginning to tire, but the excitement of going on a ship buoyed them up and the sight of it didn’t disappoint them. ‘Ulster Prince,’ Kevin said, reading out the name on the side. ‘Isn’t this grand?’ And it was grand, though the day had got duller as they travelled north, and rain began to fall as they went on to the gangplank. Maeve hoped it would stop raining soon so that the children could explore the ship without getting soaked. She peered over the rail and looked at the water lapping backwards and forwards as the vessel shifted slightly. It looked grey and scummy, not unlike the water that was left in the copper in the brew house after she’d done the washing.

The ship’s hooter sounded, making the children jump, and Kevin watched the frenzied activities on the dockside. ‘They’re pulling up the gangplank,’ he cried, ‘and loosening those thick ropes.’

Maeve lifted Grace to look over the rail and the three of them watched the ferry pull away from the shores of England and from Brendan Hogan with relief.

The ferry had gone no distance at all and Liverpool was still a blur on the horizon when Grace began to feel sick. Kevin left his nauseous sister, tended by his mother, who was, he decided, a most peculiar colour herself, and went off to explore the ship.

He was back in just a few minutes. ‘Mammy, there’s a café here,’ he cried, ‘like a proper one with pink curtains at the windows and they’re selling breakfast. Porridge, toast and jam and a pot of tea for one and six.’ He’d watched some of the people eating and his mouth had watered.

Maeve badly wanted to dip into the store of money and give him one and six. It was cheap enough, for Grace was in no state to eat and she herself was trying to ignore the churning of her stomach to deal with her daughter. But, she didn’t know how long the money would have to last them.

Regretfully Maeve shook her head. ‘I have to watch the pennies.’ Kevin didn’t argue – hadn’t it been the same all the days of his life? – but Maeve saw the disappointment in his eyes. She knew he was hungry. They’d not had much to eat on the train and to make it up to him she gave him a few sandwiches, a couple of cold sausages and a slice of cake. After it, Kevin ran around every bit of the ship that he was allowed in, along with other young boys as eager as he was to see all there was to see.

Maeve and Grace didn’t share Kevin’s enthusiasm and were glad to get off the heaving rolling ship and on to dry land once more, where Maeve shared out the rest of the food. Grace was very tired from all the travelling and once she’d eaten a little, she laid her head on her mother’s knee and went fast asleep. Even Kevin allowed his eyelids to droop. He was becoming calmer the further they went from the house, and even Maeve was more relaxed.

‘Lean against me, Kevin, if you’re tired,’ she said.

‘Aren’t you tired too?’ Kevin asked her.

‘No,’ said Maeve. ‘I’m too excited to sleep.’

She was apprehensive too, though she didn’t share that with Kevin, but whatever reception she found at her journey’s end, she knew it would be better than the life she’d left behind. Kevin was reassured and allowed himself to sleep, and so deep was his sleep that Maeve had to shake him awake when they got to Portadown.

The conductor on the rail bus they boarded for the last leg of their journey recognised Maeve. ‘Well, hello there, Maeve Brannigan.’

‘Hogan now,’ Maeve corrected him.

‘And these are your two?’ he said, smiling at the children. ‘Home for a wee holiday, are you all?’

‘We are that,’ Maeve said firmly, before either child was able to say anything else. ‘And glad of it.’

‘And I would be if I lived in Birmingham,’ the conductor said, and added to Maeve, ‘I bet your mammy will be pleased to see you. It’s strange that she didn’t mention you coming.’

‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,’ Maeve explained, and hoped her mammy would indeed be pleased.

In the dim evening light she could just see the green Donegal hills flecked with sheep, and dotted here and there with little thatched cottages that had plumes of smoke rising in the air. She closed her eyes in relief and happiness. She was nearly home. She pointed out the familiar things to the children and they listened eagerly as she described her parents’ farm to them as the rail bus ate up the miles.

‘Here we are, then,’ the conductor said suddenly.

Grace and Kevin looked about them as they alighted. ‘We can’t be here,’ Kevin said, ‘because it isn’t anywhere.’

Maeve didn’t answer him straight away and instead pulled their luggage from the rail bus to lie at a heap at their feet. She’d helped the children on with their haversacks and picked up the case before she said, ‘This isn’t a proper station like those we passed; really it’s not a stop at all, just the place nearest to the farm. We go through the gate and we’re nearly there,’ and so saying she opened the five-barred gate.

Maeve saw the children looking about them, and led them up the path that ran between two hedges bordering fields on either side. Dusk had fallen and suddenly Maeve felt the children’s hands tighten in her own.

‘Why isn’t anyone here to meet us?’ Grace asked, and Maeve could see Kevin’s puzzled eyes on her too.

Maeve also wondered that. What if they wouldn’t even see her? She told herself firmly to stop frightening the life out of herself and said as confidently as she could, ‘I expect they’re all busy, and anyway, it’s only a step away now.’ And then she laughed at the children’s fright when two cows put their heads over the hedge and lowed at them.

They came to the corner of the cottage and as they turned into the cobbled yard in front of it there was a sudden terrific noise from a building beside the barn, but Maeve told her bemused children it was just the hens locked up for the night disturbed by their footsteps on the cobbles. The words had barely left her mouth when the farmhouse door suddenly opened and two dogs leapt out of it and around them, snapping and barking. Grace screamed and held tightly to her mother.

‘Skip, Laddie,’ said a stern voice from the doorway, and Maeve turned to look at the young man framed in the doorway.

‘Colin?’ she said in wonder and surprise. ‘Little Colin?’

‘Not so little now,’ Colin replied. ‘I’m sixteen.’

She’d known he was sixteen, for hadn’t her mother written with news of the family? But in her mind Colin was still the wee boy of seven she’d left behind nine years before.

‘You’d better come in,’ Colin said.

Later the children told Maeve how pretty they thought the house was. It was low and painted white, with little windows all along the side of it and thatched with yellow straw, and grey smoke escaped from the squat chimney. The door was in two halves so you could open the top or the bottom. Both now stood open and Maeve led the children inside.

She had her heart in her mouth as she entered the dim farmhouse. It was just as if she’d never left. There was the press opposite the door containing all the crockery and a food cupboard to the side of it. Two pails of water stood on stools by the side of the bedroom door, while to the other side was the huge kitchen table before one of the windows with wooden chairs arranged around it. The settle and the armchairs were pulled up before the peat fire, and the curtained-off bed that belonged to Maeve’s parents was in the far corner.

The only difference was in the group waiting for her. There was no Tom, for he’d been married two years before, and no Liam, away in Dublin, and Kate too was living there, in the nurses’ home. Rosemarie was there, but Maeve knew she was engaged to be married, yet she’d been just twelve when Maeve had left home. Colin was still at home, and Nuala, no longer the wee child of just four striking out for independence, but almost a young lady of thirteen.

Her parents hadn’t changed. There might have been a few more grey hairs in her mother’s head, and more lines on her face and on that of her father, but they’d altered so little compared to the children. And across the room, in the silence that screamed around her, she saw them all staring at her.

Annie Brannigan waited for her daughter to speak, to explain to them why she’d done the disgraceful thing of leaving her husband and coming back home with her children.

Grace and Kevin were weary despite the snatches of sleep they’d had, and both were bone tired of getting on and off trams, trains, ships and rail buses. And now they were here in their mammy’s old home and no one seemed to welcome them at all. Maeve saw the wobbling chin of her daughter and the obstinate scowl of her son, and she licked her lips nervously and said in a voice little more than a whisper, ‘Hello, Mammy, Daddy.’

‘Hello! Is that all you can say after nine years and you descending on us like this, and the only notice a scribe of a letter that arrived this morning telling us so?’ Annie asked her daughter angrily.

‘I’m sorry,’ Maeve said. ‘I had to come. There were reasons.’

She saw Grace’s face pucker and the tears that had been threatening since she’d entered the farmhouse spilt down her cheeks. She sank to the flagged kitchen floor with a loud sob, crying, ‘I don’t like it here.’

The sight of the child crying smote Annie’s heart. Whatever was wrong it wasn’t the children’s fault, and she went forward and gathered Grace into her arms. ‘And you’re Kevin, I suppose?’ she said to the boy, who was scowling at her, and without waiting for him to answer went on, ‘Take that look off your face, boy, and come away to the fire. If I know weans, a little food won’t come amiss and will put a new complexion on the matter altogether.’

After that, it wasn’t so bad at all. No one spoke of their unexpected arrival in front of the children. Instead Annie began to prepare a meal for them while Rosemarie and Nuala laid the table and Colin carried the cases and haversacks into the bedrooms.

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?’

Maeve saw her mother was moved by what she’d told her, but she also knew her mother didn’t really want her there. You married for better or worse, richer or poorer, and that was how some would see it, regardless of what the woman had to endure. Her mother wouldn’t turn her away, Maeve knew that, but in the same circumstances many would, and would tell Annie so. By receiving her daughter, Maeve knew Annie would lose face in the small community and that mattered to her.

But Maeve knew she mattered more. She’d always been assured of her mother’s love and support, and she knew she’d not turn her back on her or the children.

And Annie could not, after all she’d heard, refuse them a place of refuge. She’d seen the lines of suffering on her daughter’s white, gaunt face, and had been shocked by the sight of her grandchildren, pitifully thin and pasty-faced, and knew whatever it cost, they were welcome in her home.

She held out her arms and cradled Maeve as she hadn’t done since she was a child. ‘Why, child, of course you can stay here and for as long as you like,’ she said. ‘Where else would you come but home? And as for your father and the others, leave them to me. I’ll tell them what I think fit.’

Tears of gratitude ran down Maeve’s cheeks and she held her mother tight. Years later she could still remember the comfort her mother’s arms and words had been.

SIX

It was just as her mother said it would be. The family all accepted her. Only her father spoke of it. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Maeve,’ he said, ‘but you’re home now and you’re safe.’

‘Thanks, Daddy,’ Maeve said, and her eyes filled with tears at his words. She wondered that she hadn’t come home sooner, but then she hadn’t the wherewithal before, that was why. But her conscience troubled her because she had two children with her and was expecting another. She couldn’t expect her parents to keep them and she decided she’d look round for a job to provide for them herself.

But when she spoke to her mother about it Annie had been adamant that if Maeve was determined to look for a job then she wasn’t to do so until after the baby was born. ‘You’re not fit for anything, the state you’re in,’ she said. ‘You’re skin and bone. You need feeding up and making healthy.’

Her father said more: ‘I’ll not have a pregnant daughter of mine go out to work, as if I hadn’t the means to keep her. When I need help to feed and clothe my own flesh and blood I’ll let you know.’

Maeve didn’t pursue the issue. The shock of what she’d done had got to her anyway, and she was worn out with it all. A peculiar lassitude seemed to affect her those first few days at the cottage as she was expected to do so little.

Elsie’s letter jolted her back into life and reminded her that Brendan was only half a day’s journey away. Elsie told Maeve that Brendan had been round to her house the first evening, as they’d thought he would, demanding to know where his wife and children were, but Elsie said she’d acted dumb and said she had no idea.

He didn’t believe me, of course, and if Alf hadn’t been by my side I wouldn’t have fancied my chances with him. He was that mad, he was shaking with it, and his face was nearly purple. I tell you the truth, Maeve, if you’d walked down the road at that minute, he would surely have killed you. Anyroad, he left me and went round a few of the other neighbours, but of course no one knew anything – you were right to keep it all to yourself. He went out, to the pub I suppose or else your uncle’s place. Anyroad, I didn’t see him come home again that night. I haven’t seen him since either. Trudy Gaskins, her that lives up the entry, said he’s moved into his mother’s place on the Pershore Road. She was up there the other night, because her daughter lives in the same road, and was on her time. She was with her all night and the next morning as she was getting ready to go home, she saw Brendan leaving his mother’s door.

The day after Elsie’s letter two more arrived for Maeve. One was from a confused Michael O’Toole. He said he presumed Maeve had run home and couldn’t understand why she’d done it, and Brendan, who’d been to his door, was just as confused as he was. The second letter, ill-written and ill-spelt, was from Brendan, demanding Maeve’s return. He reminded her she was his wife and therefore had a duty to him. Maeve barely finished the letter before she crumpled it in a ball and threw it into the fire.

She hoped any complaint and demands he was going to make would be confined to letters, for those she could handle. She’d had nightmares at first that he’d come straight after her, bawling and shouting, and was relieved as the second week drew to a close that that didn’t happen. She was beginning slowly to relax.

Not willing to tell the neighbours the whole tale of Maeve and her children fleeing from a drunken brutal husband and father, the Brannigans said the little family were on a wee holiday as the weans had been ill. No one doubted that when they looked at their pinched faces and, as it was just two weeks to the Easter holidays, the story was easy enough to believe. Coming away from Mass the first Sunday, Maeve was greeted by Father O’Brien. He hadn’t seen Maeve in years, but when he looked at the children’s stick-like arms and legs and the city pallor on their faces he thought it was a good job indeed that she’d brought them home for a wee while.

‘Come to get some fresh air in your lungs and some good food in your stomachs, have you?’ he asked them heartily.

The children regarded the priest gravely. They were used to priests and the strange way they had about them, and knew the best and easiest practice was always to agree. ‘Yes, Father,’ they said in unison.

The priest said a similar thing the next week and the children made a similar response. By then, most of the parish knew Maeve was home and not before time, most said, by the look of them all. She was welcomed by women of her own age she’d been at school with and scores of neighbours and friends she’d known for years. Many asked her up for an afternoon or evening, but she always made excuses not to go. She didn’t want to be asked any searching questions about her absent husband, or life back in Birmingham.

She was not unhappy. She was at peace and wanted nothing more than that.

The Easter holidays began and the days slid pleasantly one into another. The children followed their grandfather round the farm as he showed them the things growing in the ground, or lifted them up for rides on the tractor.

No animals frightened them now, not the barking boisterous dogs, nor the clucking hens, not even the strutting rooster, nor smelly pig and certainly not the cows that had startled them the first night. They thought their mournful brown eyes looked sad or wise or both, and when the cows stuck their heads over the fence to be stroked their fur felt like velvet and both children loved them.

All in all they were delighted with the place, which was as different from their own home as anything could possibly be. Also, for the first time, they enjoyed their lives free of stress and fear. Their faces had lost the wary look they’d had on arrival and Maeve marvelled at the difference in them after only a few weeks and knew she’d made the right decision to bring them home to Ireland.

The Wednesday before Easter, in Holy Week, Maeve went to confession one evening. It would be her second time, for she’d been to confession the first week she’d arrived, but she always went before Easter like all good Catholics.

She went through the usual litany of sins, feelings and expressing anger, small acts of spitefulness, the odd swearword or blasphemy, impatience, forgetting prayers, letting her attention slip at Mass and the odd impure thought that entered her mind.

When she finished, there was silence the other side of the grille and then the priest, his voice as cold as steel, said, ‘Go on, my child.’

‘I . . . I can’t think of any more sins, Father.’

‘Maeve, I’m ashamed of you,’ the priest said sternly. ‘You have shattered the sacrament of marriage in which God has joined you to Brendan Hogan for life. Yet you chose to walk out on him, depriving him of his wife and children. Don’t you think that is something to repent of and ask forgiveness for?’

Maeve was stunned. She wondered for a moment how he knew, but Father O’Brien then enlightened her without her having to ask. ‘Just this morning I received a most distressing letter from a Father Trelawney, whom I believe is the parish priest at St Catherine’s where you both attend.’

Maeve wasn’t even surprised. She might have known Brendan would go scurrying to his parish priest to enlist his help. He’d probably been urged on by his family, his domineering father and insignificant mother. ‘See the priest, son. See if he can bring her to her senses.’

Maeve always thought Father Trelawney was Brendan’s partner in crime, for whether it was beating her and Kevin black and blue, or spending every penny in the house on drink, leaving them cold and hungry, Father Trelawney wiped it out in confession. Brendan would return from church smug and certain that his soul was as white as the driven snow and begin his nefarious practices all over again. Well, as far as she was concerned they could all jump in the river. She was not going back to that life.

She swallowed hard and spoke firmly in an effort to explain to the priest. ‘Father, I—’

‘If you do not go back, Maeve,’ the priest said, cutting off Maeve’s attempt at explanation before she’d even begun, ‘I can give you no absolution from your sins. You are committing a mortal sin and if you have no intention of returning to your rightful place beside your husband, God cannot forgive you. You will have to live in a state of sin.’

Maeve stumbled from the box, shocked to the core. She needed confession to feel cleansed from all her wrongdoings in order to be in a state of grace to receive Communion. Now she wouldn’t dare to go up to the altar. For one thing, her conscience wouldn’t let her and for another she’d be terrified Father O’Brien would refuse her the Sacraments and make a show of her.

At home she hid her distress until the children had gone to bed and then sobbed in her mother’s arms. For twenty-seven years she’d been a good Catholic girl, attending Mass on Sundays and going to Devotions and Benediction often, and always going regularly to the Mission when priests travelled around Ireland preaching in the churches. She went to confession every fortnight and took Communion every Sunday and prayed as often as she remembered. The Church and its rituals were part of her life and now she’d been refused absolution because she wouldn’t return to a violent sadistic man who terrorised her and her children and didn’t give them enough money to live on. Yet she felt as if she’d lost a limb, as if she’d been cast adrift, and though she was glad of her mother’s comforting arms, they could not solve the problem. She knew that she’d not heard the end of it.

After Maeve’s experience, none of the rest of the family went to confession either, and for the first time ever, Annie didn’t attend the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. And though they all went to Mass on Easter Sunday morning, no one went to Communion. Most of the congregation took Communion and they looked askance at Annie sitting with her daughters and grandchildren – Thomas and Colin had gone to early Mass – and wondered why they were not going to the altar.

Kevin and Grace were blissfully unaware of any dissension in the family, for nothing was discussed in front of them. By Easter Sunday they’d had a wonderful week with their Uncle Colin and Aunt Nuala, who spent a lot of time with their young relations whenever their chores on the farm enabled them to.

That Sunday Maeve’s children didn’t notice that the family scurried from the church without talking to any friends as they normally did, and they certainly didn’t care. Their grandma had killed two chickens as it was a special day and a good dinner awaited them with pudding, as Lent was now over, and then they had the bar of chocolate each that Rosemarie had bought from the town for them to eat. They’d just discovered chocolate, which they’d never tasted before – not that they’d had much of it now either, for neither their grandma nor their mother approved of their eating too many sweet things, but both Kevin and Grace loved chocolate. They liked it to melt in their mouths and run down their throats, and to have a whole bar each was sheer luxury.

The Wednesday after Easter, Maeve was by the window when she spotted Father O’Brien striding purposefully down the lane and she felt her insides contract with fear. Annie was stirring a pot hung over the fire and hadn’t seen him approach and she was glad they were alone, her father having taken the children, together with Nuala and Colin, in the cart to the peat bogs to cut turf.

‘Mammy,’ Maeve said, ‘the priest’s here.’

Annie straightened up, and her eyes met those of her daughter. The priest gave a tentative knock and lifted the latch as Annie cried, ‘Come away in, Father.’

The priest seemed to fill the room. ‘Will I take your coat?’ Annie said. ‘And will you be having a cup of tea?’

Father O’Brien didn’t take his eyes from Maeve and she met them boldly, but he divested himself of his coat and said, ‘A cup of tea would be very nice, so it would. Shall we sit down, Maeve?’

Maeve’s legs were shaking and the top of her mouth was suddenly dry. She told herself she was a grown woman and this man before her couldn’t make her do anything; he could hardly pick her up bodily and take her back to Birmingham. And yet she knew it was a mistake to underestimate a priest’s power.

He waited till Maeve was sitting opposite him, the kettle singing over the glowing peat and Annie busy at the dresser sorting out the best cup and saucer for the priest, and then he looked Maeve full in the face.

‘Well, Maeve,’ he said.

‘Well what, Father?’

‘Have you no idea why I felt it necessary to come out here and visit you?’

‘Suppose you tell me?’ Dear God, Maeve thought. What was the matter with her, answering the priest like that?

He didn’t like it; she saw a frown furrow his brow and his eyebrows jerked up in surprise. ‘Now, Maeve,’ he said, ‘there is no need for you to be like this. I told you of the letter I received from your parish priest. Last night I had a most disturbing call from the man.’

Maeve didn’t reply and so the priest went on, ‘Maeve, surely I do not have to remind you of your marriage vows?’

‘No, Father. You have to remind me of nothing.’

‘Father Trelawney said your husband is distraught, and with good reason, I’d say by your attitude.’

‘My attitude!’ Maeve cried. ‘I’m sorry, Father, but you know nothing about it. It’s Brendan’s attitude needs to be sorted out.’

Annie came bustling towards them then for the kettle was boiling noisily. She made a cup of tea for all of them, while Father O’Brien shook his head as he said, ‘Father Trelawney tells me there were a few problems in your marriage, but that your husband is willing to meet you halfway.’

‘A few problems! Is that what they call it these days?’ Maeve said with a sneer. ‘My husband, Father, drinks nearly every penny he earns, keeping me and the children short, and apart from that he is a vicious bully, both to me and my son.’

‘Father Trelawney mentioned that you make trouble whenever your husband has seen fit to discipline the boy.’

‘Discipline him? Using his belt on a wee boy, who even now is only just seven years old.’

‘Boys, even wee boys, can be very bold. We both know that, Maeve,’ Father O’Brien said. ‘And, you know, it is a father’s duty to chastise his children.’

Maeve shook her head in disbelief. What Brendan had done was not mere chastisement, but how could she make the man before her believe how it really was? ‘All right then, Father. Let’s leave Kevin for the moment. Is it a husband’s duty to chastise his wife too?’

‘It’s a husband’s duty to demand obedience from his wife. You promised to love, honour and obey him, you know.’

‘I know what I said,’ Maeve barked. ‘And I was a fool, for the man is brutal. I have been bruised head to toe by my husband and my face has been such a mess, I’ve had to hide from my neighbours till the swelling has gone down and the black eye’s not so noticeable. As for my son, he still has the stripes across his back from his father’s attempts at disciplining him.’

‘Your husband told Father Trelawney you are argumentative and undermine his treatment of the children. In other words, you provoke him.’

‘Oh, so now it’s my fault?’

‘Not at all,’ Father O’Brien said. ‘Don’t be so hasty, Maeve.’

Annie had remained in the other chair during this time, completely silent. She saw her daughter become agitated and though she knew she had a point in everything she said, she was shocked to see Maeve attacking the parish priest in such a fashion. In order to give Maeve time to compose herself, she said, ‘Would you like another cup of tea, Father?’

The priest handed the cup across to Annie. ‘That would be lovely, thank you,’ he said, and then he directed himself again to Maeve. ‘Perhaps that is one of the problems here.’

‘What is?’

‘Your hot-headedness,’ Father O’Brien said.

‘My hot-headedness, Father, is because you want me to return to a brutal bully and I won’t. You don’t seem to have listened to a word I’ve said as to why I won’t go back to him.’

‘I have listened, Maeve,’ Father O’Brien chided. ‘I have also said your husband is so upset by your flight over here he has promised to change.’

‘Oh yes,’ Maeve said sarcastically. ‘I bet.’

‘Maeve, you’re not being very helpful.’

‘No, Father, I’m not, am I? That will probably be another black mark against me, won’t it?’

Father O’Brien tutted in impatience. Maeve saw he was controlling his anger with difficulty. Without another word, he drained the cup of tea Annie had handed him and got to his feet before he looked at Maeve again. ‘Is that your last word on the subject?’

‘It is, Father.’

‘Then, child, I’ll pray for you.’

‘Thank you. I’m probably in need of prayer.’

‘Don’t mock, Maeve. It doesn’t become you,’ Father O’Brien said sternly.

‘Who’s mocking, Father?’ Maeve asked innocently. ‘I don’t know one soul in the land who would not value prayer.’

Again he tutted in annoyance. Annie had run before him to retrieve his coat and as he took it from her he said, ‘And what is your view on this, Annie? Are you prepared to harbour Maeve and her children, although she is a married woman?’

Annie shrugged. ‘She’s my daughter, Father,’ she said.

A little later they stood at the window and watched the priest stride angrily up the path.

Annie said, ‘This won’t be the end of it, lass. It’s just the beginning.’

‘I know, Mammy,’ Maeve said with a sigh.

There was talk in the village when Maeve went to enrol her children in the village school after the Easter holidays. The headmaster, Mr Monahan, expressed surprise, and Maeve admitted that there were some problems at home that she needed time alone to sort out and she thought it better the children missed as little schooling as possible. Mr Monahan was impressed with the young woman before him, softly spoken but with a decided lift to her chin. He remembered the cowed skinny children she’d arrived with and now saw them sitting each side of their mother definitely much improved even after a few short weeks.

He wondered what the problem was at home and hoped it wasn’t serious, but taking the children into school could only benefit them even if it were for just a short time. He’d had to mention it to Father O’Brien, but he couldn’t foresee any opposition there and he smiled at the children and welcomed them to the school.

They’d been there about ten days when Maeve received a letter from Father Trelawney. In it he expressed Brendan’s regret for the way things had turned out. Father Trelawney said he was truly sorry and he promised things would be different if she returned. Maeve passed it over to her mother to read and when Annie gave it back to her she screwed it into a ball and threw it on the fire.

‘You don’t think he might change?’ Annie said. ‘You’ve given him a shock, leaving him – mightn’t that bring him to his senses?’

Maeve shook her head. ‘He was always sorry when he hit me at first,’ she said. ‘That didn’t last, though. No, Mammy. I can’t risk it. Not for me and the child I’m carrying, nor for Kevin and Grace. Do you want me to go? Are you worried that I’ve broken my marriage vows?’

‘All I want is for you to be happy, child,’ Annie said. ‘And I’ll abide by your decision.’

‘I wonder what the priest would feel if he’d seen the mess Brendan has left me in after a particularly bad beating,’ Maeve said bitterly. ‘Or caught sight of the weals on Kevin’s back. God, Mammy, I can’t go back to that.’

‘Calm yourself, child. Sure, no one’s forcing you to.’

‘Father O’Brien is having a damn good try and now the priest from St Catherine’s has joined in.’

‘Sure, isn’t that their job?’ Annie said placatingly. ‘Are you going to write back to the man?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Is that wise, pet?’ Annie said. ‘Tell him how brutal Brendan is to you. Tell your side of the story.’

‘It’s too late for that, Mammy,’ Maeve said resignedly. ‘He and Brendan are great friends. Sure Brendan has got in with his excuses and he’ll never believe different. I never went to him for help while I was there. Why should he believe anything I say now?’

Annie wasn’t sure whether ignoring the letter was a wise course of action or not. But the decision had to be Maeve’s and she said nothing more on the subject.

Just over a week later Maeve got a letter asking her to call at the school to discuss Kevin’s progress.

‘What have you done?’ she asked her son that evening.

‘Me? Nothing,’ Kevin said. ‘Why?’

‘The headmaster wants to see me and whatever it is, it’s about you.’

But Kevin couldn’t enlighten her and Maeve saw no expression of guilt on his face as he said, ‘I don’t know, Mammy.’

Despite that, Maeve was sure Kevin was lying. She was sure Mr Monahan would tell Maeve about his misbehaviour in the classroom, his pranks in the playground, or his lack of progress in his studies. As she sat in the headmaster’s stuffy little room, two days later, she was totally unprepared for what he did say.

‘Remove him from the Communion classes?’ she repeated. ‘But why? I know he’s not been here long, but he’d been doing the classes at St Catherine’s in Birmingham since January. He knows most of the catechism. We test him on it in the evenings.’

The headmaster coughed nervously. He hated saying what he had to say and Maeve could see he did. She’d sensed his sympathy for her and Kevin too, but knew it would be Father O’Brien’s doing. She saw it as clearly as if he were standing before her pontificating. He’d say the sins of the fathers are visited on the children as the Good Book said, even to the third and fourth generation. He’d remind Mr Monahan where his duty lay, and that wasn’t welcoming to the Communion rails for the first time the son of a wife who’d upped and left her husband. He’d be sure Mr Monahan could explain that adequately to Maeve Hogan. That was, of course, if he wanted to keep his job.

Mr Monahan faced Mrs Hogan and coughed nervously. ‘Mrs Hogan, it’s more to do with influence in the home. Father O’Brien thinks that Kevin might not be picking up the right example. Maybe it would be better to wait for a year or so, when his future is more settled.’

Maeve felt her face burning with embarrassment at the same time as furious anger filled her being. She stared at the middle-aged man before her and knew he was just Father O’Brien’s lackey. ‘Do I have a choice in this?’ she asked in clipped precise tones. ‘Or has Father O’Brien already decided and his decision is final?’

‘I . . . I could ask him for you,’ the headmaster said.

‘Don’t worry,’ Maeve said. ‘I’ll ask him myself.’

She swung out of the headmaster’s office, her blue eyes smouldering and her cheeks red, and out into the church, where she found Father O’Brien in one of the pews reading his Office – the prayer book priests had to read every day. Even in her rage, she noted thankfully that the church was deserted. Early Mass was over, and no one was doing the flowers for the altar, or cleaning the place. The priest turned at her arrival and laid the book down in the pew beside him, and Maeve glared at him across the expanse of the church as she strode angrily towards him.

‘How low can you sink?’ she demanded.

The priest’s brown eyes looked puzzled, but his mouth had a sardonic smile playing around it as he said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You know full well what I’m talking about. I’ve just come from the school.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Father O’Brien said.

‘What right had you to take out your spite against my son? It’s me you’re angry with, not him.’

‘I assure you, I did not take the decision over spite against anyone,’ Father O’Brien said. ‘I am not angry with you either, more disappointed. You were always headstrong, Maeve, even as a wee girl, but I never expected you to do anything like this.’

Maeve ignored the things the priest said about her. In her opinion she was here to discuss just one issue. ‘Mr Monahan said Kevin is to be removed from the First Communion class and it was at your suggestion.’

‘He is correct.’

‘What right have you?’

‘I have all manner of rights, Maeve,’ the priest said. ‘But what right had you to uproot your children from their home and their father and bring them over here to Ireland, and once here, you refuse to either discuss it or consider returning? You are damaging your children.’

‘I am not,’ Maeve protested. ‘I’m their mother and I’m doing what I think is best for them.’

‘Ah, yes. I’m glad we’ve got to that point,’ the priest said. ‘Where is their father in all this?’

‘Their father is—’

‘Does he have no rights?’

‘No. No, he bloody well doesn’t,’ Maeve cried. Her rage had reached boiling point and she could see sparks in front of her eyes. ‘He has thrown them away. Do you know, you arrogant sod, that the bastard you want me to return to has killed, by his own brutality, a child I had carried for six months and one of the reasons I left this time was to protect the one I’m carrying now?’

‘I know that is what you would like people to believe,’ the priest said.

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘I mean, your husband told Father Trelawney all about it. It appeared to be a tragic accident,’ the priest said. ‘Your husband admits he pushed you. He was administering punishment to young Kevin for not coming in when he was called, and what father wouldn’t? He said you were like a wild animal, screaming and trying to rake his face with your nails and kick his legs. He pushed you and you fell against the fireguard. Next minute, you were on the floor groaning.’

Maeve stared at him open-mouthed. That wasn’t how it was, but it was what the priest believed and from what he said, Father Trelawney did too. Whatever she said now, they wouldn’t believe her.

Father O’Brien went on, ‘And you must understand, I have no desire to punish your children, either of them, but the consequences of your actions will have to have far-reaching effects on your family – all of your family.’

It was uttered like a threat and Maeve shivered. She was filled with loathing for the plump self-satisfied priest with eyes full of condemnation and the pinched-in nostrils and hard cruel mouth. She wanted to put her hands over her head and scream in frustration, and her voice indeed rose in a scream as she cried out, ‘You sadistic bastard, you’re bloody well enjoying all this.’

The door of the church swung closed with a dull thud and the two combatants turned. Cissie O’Brien was the priest’s sister. She looked after his house for him and had come to tell him his dinner was nearly ready. She glared at Maeve malevolently and Maeve knew she thought her circumstances of arriving at her mother’s house with two children and no husband was very suspicious. Maeve had played into her hands for she knew she’d have heard clearly the abuse and swearwords she’d hurled at the priest even before she’d opened the door because Maeve’s voice had bordered on hysterical.

Maeve looked at the older woman’s eyes glittering with malicious dislike and knew she’d blown it. The rumours about them all had begun when she started the children at school and now she knew what she screamed at the priest would be all over the neighbourhood in twenty-four hours. Everyone would know that she hadn’t brought the children for a wee holiday because they’d been ill at all, but that she’d actually left her husband. Cissie O’Brien would say her brother, the priest, had taken her to task about it, which after all was his job, and what a reaction he got. Maeve knew Cissie O’Brien would let people know what type of woman Maeve Hogan was and would take pleasure in doing it.

SEVEN

The following day, Kevin came home from school in tears. He’d held them in all day at school and most of the way home, but when he turned in the lane home, he broke down.

‘Miss Kerrigan says I’m not to go into instruction for Holy Communion any more,’ he explained between sobs to his mother. ‘She says maybe I’ll take it next year instead, but Declan and Martin are my age and taking it in July. Now everyone laughs at me in the playground and says I’m dumb and don’t know my catechism, but I do.’

Maeve held her small angry son and could find no words to comfort him. At Mass the following Sunday, the Brannigans were all snubbed by friends and neighbours they’d known for years. Added to that, the brothers at Colin’s school had made a few snide remarks about his family, and the lads had jeered at him a bit, and Nuala claimed she was almost ignored in the school yard.

Rosemarie said the bakery was busier than ever, but people didn’t buy much, they just wanted to stand in groups and talk loudly, so that she would hear, about the Brannigan family they said had always thought themselves better than anyone else. Her future mother-in-law, a cow of the first order anyway, had expressed doubts about her Greg getting mixed up with such a family after the eldest of them had just upped and left her husband in that shocking way, and had Greg heard what she’d said to the priest?

Maeve felt sick. She had brought all this on her family.

‘Never mind, child,’ Thomas told his daughter. ‘They’re ignorant. It’ll blow over.’

But for Kevin and Grace, it didn’t blow over. Grace said nothing about the girls who’d once been her friends, who now refused to play with her and who stood with others in clusters and taunted her, but she became quieter than ever.

Kevin, on the other hand, could not hide his skirmishes – like the time he came home with his knuckles skinned and a split lip, nor the time he had a bloody nose and a torn shirt, nor the marks of the cane across his hand.

‘What did you get the cane for?’ Maeve asked him.

‘Fighting.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she cried. ‘All this fighting. You never used to fight.’

Kevin looked at the floor and said nothing.

‘Well? What did you fight about?’

Kevin shrugged and Maeve had the urge to shake him till his teeth rattled. ‘Kevin?’ she said threateningly.

‘It’s because they say he hasn’t got a daddy,’ Grace said.

The look Kevin threw her was one of hate. ‘Big mouth Grace,’ he said.

‘That will do,’ Maeve said automatically. ‘What do you mean, you haven’t got a daddy?’

‘That’s what they said,’ Kevin sighed, because now Grace had told their mother what it was all about there was no point in not explaining it all. ‘They said if we had a daddy, he’d be here, someone would have seen him and no one has. That’s why I fought. Then today they started again in the playground. I punched one boy in the face and told them we didn’t want our daddy to live with us because he’s a miserable old bugger, that’s why I got the cane.’

Maeve glanced across the room to see her father and Colin trying to hide their smiles behind their hands, but Maeve didn’t feel like laughing. She’d been living nine weeks at her parents’ farm and had missed her third period, the morning sickness had almost stopped and although physically she felt well, mentally she was a wreck.

And how should she deal with it? Eventually she said crisply, ‘Of course you have a daddy – everyone has a daddy somewhere and daddies don’t have to live with their wives and children.’

‘Ours won’t, will he?’ Grace asked fearfully.

‘No,’ Maeve said firmly. ‘But that isn’t the point. He still is and always will be your father, whether he lives with us or not. And, as for you, Kevin,’ she added, turning back to her son, ‘there’s to be no more fighting about it and no bad language, or you’ll feel my hand across your bottom.’

‘Ach, he’ll hear worse before he’s much older,’ Thomas told his daughter.

‘Not from me, he won’t,’ Maeve said. But she knew the swearwords her small son unwittingly used were not the biggest issue here.

‘Come away in, anyway,’ Annie said. ‘Let’s not quarrel among ourselves.’

Maeve sighed. ‘Aye.’ Her mother was right. They had enough trouble with people outside of the family; they shouldn’t fight each other.

‘Don’t worry so much, pet,’ Thomas told his daughter. ‘It’ll just be a nine-days’ wonder, you’ll see.’

Maeve knew he was trying to cheer her up and didn’t believe that any more than he did, but she gave him a watery smile anyway. ‘I really hope so, Daddy. Oh, I really hope so.’

But the situation didn’t ease. Other family members, although supportive, didn’t understand what it was like. Tom, for example, was living far enough away from the family to belong to another parish entirely. He came to see Maeve and though he told her forcibly no woman should be forced to stay with a man who beat his wife and child and drank his wages, he couldn’t help her at all.

Liam and Kate, away in Dublin, had almost forgotten what life was like in the small towns and villages in the north of Ireland, but in their letters to Maeve they urged her to stick to her guns after Annie wrote telling them all about it. And Maeve was glad of their support, for the only positive letters she got apart from theirs were from Elsie, who told her of the goings-on of the street. She also assured Maeve that while the tale of her taking off with the children was on everyone’s lips for a while, in a street where one person’s business is known to all, there were always new bits of gossip to chew over.

Her Uncle Michael, on the other hand, seemed totally confused by Maeve’s flight. He expressed surprise that she’d returned to the very place that just a few years before she was mad to get away from. And he claimed Brendan was a broken man. He wrote to Annie:

Besides, I don’t see that the problem between them could be so big, or surely I would have had some indication of it? Brendan, at any rate, is willing to forgive and forget and I think Maeve would be best to come home now. She has taught him a wee lesson and I’m sure he’ll be a changed man after it.

‘Why does no one see the man is evil through and through?’ Maeve cried.

‘You didn’t,’ Annie reminded her. ‘It took you some time to get the measure of him. And when all’s said and done, despite what you said about the house you live in, and how everyone knows your business, the man seen walking down the street might not be the same as the one within your own four walls.’

Maeve knew her mother was right. No one but his family had known Brendan as she had, yet she’d not seen through the veneer of his charm and had paid the price for nine years. Surely to God that was long enough?

Father O’Brien didn’t think so. He was at the farmhouse the Saturday evening after Annie had received Michael’s letter with yet another letter from Father Trelawney.

‘This letter from your parish priest, Maeve, has your husband’s assurance that things will be different. He promises that this will be so. He says also that you are unreasonable in some of your demands on him. Going for a drink after he finishes work is not unusual in a job such as his.’

‘I know that, Father,’ Maeve cried. ‘I’m being made out to be a monster. I don’t object to Brendan having a drink and never have had. But surely to God it’s not right to take food from the weans’ mouths for his beer money, or to give to the bookie’s runner?’

Father O’Brien smiled and Maeve had the urge to smack him hard enough to swipe the smile from his face, especially when he said, ‘Don’t you think you’re exaggerating just a little?’

‘No, I bloody well don’t,’ Maeve said. ‘I wish you’d all leave me alone and mind your own business.’

‘Your spiritual welfare is my business.’ Father O’Brien shook his head. Father Trelawney said Maeve was subject to exaggeration and, anyway, whatever Brendan Hogan had done in the past, he’d assured him he had changed, he’d been so upset by his wife’s actions. ‘You must give the man a chance, Maeve,’ he said. ‘You must forget the past. Things will be different now, I’m sure of it.’

Maeve didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it, but Father O’Brien did and so did Father Trelawney. She was the wicked perpetrator who wanted to end their mockery of a marriage and Brendan the deserted husband, seemingly out of his mind with worry, and promising the moon if only his wife would come back to him.

She turned to face the priest. ‘And can you guarantee that no harm will befall the child I’m carrying? And that no incident, however accidental, will result in a miscarriage? Whether you believe it or not, the child I miscarried was due to the impact of a hobnail boot in my stomach and I carry the imprint still. Whatever I told the authorities, they didn’t believe me. I should imagine that they have me on some list or other, labelled “Suspicious Circumstances”, don’t you?’

Maeve had no idea whether this was true or not but, she guessed, neither would the priest. She was right, he didn’t, and he made no attempt to answer her. Instead, he turned to Rosemarie, who was waiting for Greg to pick her up. Father O’Brien had chosen the time to visit the family with care, wanting them all to be there.

‘Are you looking forward to your wedding, Rosemarie?’ he asked.

Rosemarie was disarmed. Whatever argument the priest had with Maeve, she decided, did not concern her and she certainly couldn’t be blamed in any way. ‘Why, yes, Father.’

Father O’Brien smiled, and Maeve, seeing it, recognised the curl of the lip that had been the same as Brendan’s just before he was to deliver the punch between the eyes. ‘It would be a pity then,’ the priest said, ‘to postpone the ceremony.’

‘But, Father, there’s no need,’ Rosemarie said, and Maeve could have wept for the naïvety and genuine bewilderment in her voice. ‘Everything is arranged for August now.’

‘Ah yes, but I wonder if you understand the sanctity of marriage, Rosemarie?’

‘Yes, Father. Of course I do.’

‘Your sister doesn’t seem to.’

‘Father, surely that’s nothing to do with me?’

‘Not directly, no,’ the priest said. ‘I just want you to fully understand the commitment you’re making.’

‘Stop this!’ Maeve cried. ‘Hound and harass me if you must, but for God’s sake, leave my family alone.’

Father O’Brien’s eyes sparkled with hatred. ‘Leave your family alone,’ he repeated. ‘Like your family should have left you alone. Your mother should have shown you the door when you arrived, lest you corrupt your young brother and two sisters. But she didn’t, so they share in your guilt and shame and will continue to do so, until you see sense.’

‘Father, for pity’s sake,’ Annie cried. ‘How could I turn my back on my own child?’

‘When a woman is given in marriage, she and her husband should be as one,’ Father O’Brien thundered. ‘It was your Christian duty to point this out to Maeve.’

‘Oh, you’d know all about it,’ Thomas said sarcastically. ‘Marriage, and all it means. Don’t you come to my door again threatening my bloody family.’

‘Thomas!’

‘Don’t you “Thomas” me, Annie. The man has a bloody nerve.’

‘Shouting at me will change nothing,’ Father O’Brien said. ‘To come between a husband and wife is a mortal sin, and you should be aware of it. If you were to die with a mortal sin on your soul before you were able to repent and ask forgiveness, you would roast eternally in hell’s flames.’

Maeve saw her mother’s face blanch with fear, but her father’s was red in temper. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘Well, let me tell you, if welcoming my daughter, who was in dire need, is your idea of mortal sin, then I’d be glad to meet the others of like mind in hell and shake them by the hand. Not that I intend to see them for a wee while yet.’

‘Thomas, you are making a grave mistake,’ Father O’Brien said. ‘God will not be mocked.’

‘It’s not God I’m mocking, you sanctimonious bugger,’ Thomas said. ‘And if you have nothing further to say, I’d like you to leave.’

‘As I said, you’re making a grave mistake.’

‘No doubt. Good night, Father.’ Thomas turned from the priest and sat down facing the fire with his back to the outraged man, then threw on another two peat bricks and gave the fire a poke.

It was up to Annie, flustered and upset, to see the priest to the door. ‘I’m sorry, Father,’ she said in a whisper as she opened it for him. ‘He’s . . . Thomas is a wee bit upset.’

‘It’s not to be wondered at. Everyone is upset when they go against God and what He wants,’ the priest said, ducking his head to go out of the farmhouse. ‘Think carefully about what I said back there, Annie. Good night to you.’

‘Good night, Father.’ She closed the door behind the priest.

Thomas turned to his wife and growled, ‘Don’t you ever do that again and apologise in my own house on my behalf.’

‘I couldn’t leave it like that,’ Annie protested. ‘You swearing at the priest and ordering him from the place.’

‘You should think yourself lucky. If I’d had to look and listen to the hypocrite much longer, I would have punched him on the jaw,’ Thomas said.

‘That wouldn’t have helped anyone, Daddy,’ Rosemarie said, and she appealed to her mother. ‘Do you think he meant it, about postponing the wedding? Only Greg’s mother wouldn’t like it.’

Maeve knew Greg’s mother wouldn’t, but then she liked so little. In many ways she felt sorry for Rosemarie, for Sadie Fearney was a widow and reliant on her son, Greg. She had no desire for him to take a wife and lose her place in the household, and Maeve guessed would make Rosemarie’s life a misery unless she established herself at the very beginning. The last thing Rosemarie needed was for the priest to postpone that wedding indirectly because of something her elder sister did. Surely he couldn’t do that, even though priests seemed to be a law unto themselves. Surely that was going beyond the bounds of reasonableness?

‘I’m sure that was just an empty threat,’ Maeve said. ‘Just said to frighten and worry you.’

‘I hope so,’ Rosemarie said. Greg didn’t have a very strong personality and was not able to stand against his mother at the best of times, and Rosemarie was not one for asserting herself either. She was frightened of her future mother-in-law, but she also knew if she wasn’t to marry Greg, life would lose its meaning and if the priest were to succeed in blocking the wedding, Rosemarie knew Sadie would make hay out of it.

Maeve could see the worry of having a mortal sin on her soul was torturing her mother. Annie could never remember committing a mortal sin before. Mortal sin was for stealing, murder, adultery or missing Mass, but Annie had done none of those things and Maeve knew she would fret over the priest’s words. Her father might be able to fend them off but her mother couldn’t do that, she knew, and her heart felt like lead.

That night in bed, she lay long after Grace, Nuala and Rosemarie’s even breathing told her they were asleep, and she thought about the trouble she’d brought to her family. Even the children were no longer carefree. Now Grace often had mysterious stomach aches before school, and both she and Kevin returned solemn-eyed and never spoke of the happenings through the day as they once had done. Neither indeed did Nuala and Colin, and Maeve guessed they were going through it too – and Rosemarie, behind the counter in a shop in the town, unable to hide away from people. Maeve supposed she should be grateful Rosemarie hadn’t been sacked, but she knew she probably had to run the gauntlet daily.

Then, there was her mother, a prisoner on the farm for she couldn’t face the townspeople. Thomas had to fetch her groceries, and though she went to Mass, she didn’t go to confession, Benediction or Devotions and hadn’t been to the Mothers’ Union since Maeve had arrived at her door.

Maeve knew she had to return and, if necessary, live out the travesty of her marriage in her back-to-back hovel in Birmingham. Then maybe everyone else’s life could go on as before. But she’d not take the children back to suffer with her. She couldn’t do that to them for she knew full well what she’d be returning to.

She’d dreamt of starting afresh in Ireland, bringing her children up in peace and tranquillity and, in time, getting a job. Now the dream lay in tatters, and ahead of her, she had no doubt, lay a nightmare. She sobbed in the bed, muffling her tears in the pillow.

The next afternoon, she went to see Father O’Brien. She went alone, for she’d not told the family of her decision.

Cissie O’Brien, the priest’s sister, looked at Maeve coldly. ‘Yes?’

‘I’d like to see the priest, please.’

‘He’s resting after his dinner.’

‘It’s urgent.’ And it was urgent, Maeve thought, for if she didn’t carry out the resolution now, having wrestled with it all night, she’d lose the courage to do it at all.

‘Wait a minute,’ Cissie said through compressed lips. ‘I’ll see how he is.’

A little later she was back, disapproval written all over her face. ‘Come in,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Father will see you now.’

Father O’Brien was sitting before a fire, in a cosy-looking armchair in a comfortably furnished but very tidy sitting room.

‘Well, Maeve?’ Father O’Brien said heartily as if they’d never had a cross word in their lives. ‘This is a surprise.’ He got up from the chair and said, ‘Sit down, sit down. I’ll ask Cissie for tea.’

‘No!’ It came out louder and sharper than Maeve intended, and she went on, ‘No, I’m sorry, I want no tea and I’d prefer to stand. What I have to say shouldn’t take long.’

Father O’Brien’s eyes narrowed but, undaunted, Maeve persevered. ‘If I was to return to my husband,’ she said, ‘would you stop the harassment of my family?’

‘Maeve, I object to the word harassment.’

‘Call it what you like – your bounden Christian duty, if you like,’ Maeve said impatiently. ‘I’ve not come to bandy words with you but to ask for assurances. If I return, will you hear the confessions of my family and administer Communion to them at Mass? Will my mother be able to shop in Ballyglen again without folk whispering and sniggering behind her back? And will the children be free of taunts? And finally, will you allow Rosemarie’s wedding to go ahead as planned and allow Kevin to rejoin the Communion class?’

‘Maeve, that isn’t all my doing.’

‘A fair bit of it is,’ Maeve said. ‘And you could have stopped it all with one or two words to the parishioners from the pulpit. Isn’t there a piece in the Bible, where Jesus meets the prostitute at the well, and when people would have stoned her to death Jesus stopped them and said that those who were without sin should cast the first stone? As I remember it, the woman got away without a mark on her. That’s what my God’s like, Father. Yours seems full of anger: “Vengeance is mine; . . . saith the Lord.” Mine says, “Do your best, you’re only human.”’

‘Maeve, you are blasphemous!’

‘I’m not, Father,’ Maeve said. ‘My God is very real to me, but I can’t see Him like you do.’

‘Do you believe God speaks through me?’

Maeve shrugged. ‘It’s what we’re taught to believe. I don’t know, but whether you are answering for yourself or as God’s mouthpiece, can you answer my questions?’

‘And you will go back to Brendan?’

‘Aye. And whether it’s your God or mine, I hope one of them will help me,’ Maeve said.

Father O’Brien pursed his lips, but didn’t censure Maeve further. ‘If your parents come and confess their sins in confession – all their sins – then there will be no problem with that, or allowing them to take Communion. Rosemarie’s wedding will go ahead as planned, but Kevin will be going back to Birmingham with you.’

‘No, Father, he won’t. Nor will Grace.’

‘Oh, I’m sure Brendan—’

‘Brendan, Father, won’t give a tinker’s cuss. In any case with all the talk of war, I feel the children will be safer over here in Ireland. He’s never cared for them anyway, and they are scared witless of him. When he hears I am pregnant again, he will be furious. But this time, I want to carry this baby. Another condition is that Father Trelawney tells him that if anything happens to the child, he’ll be held responsible.’

‘Maeve, the miscarriage was an accident.’

‘Well, I want no more of them,’ Maeve said firmly. ‘So will you do it?’

Father O’Brien looked at the girl before him and for all her twenty-seven years he thought, she was little more than a girl. Her body was slender despite the slight rounding of her stomach and her frame small-boned, her whole face was determined, but behind the determination he read real fear and apprehension in Maeve’s face. He nodded. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he promised.

‘And, Father, Brendan can drink the pubs dry for all I care, as long as he tips up the rent and money for the gas and enough to feed us.’

‘Didn’t you say he beat you?’ Father O’Brien said. ‘Don’t you want that stopped too?’

Maeve sighed. ‘The age of miracles is passed,’ she said. ‘Brendan will never change. In fact, not having Kevin to torment and terrify might make it worse for me, but I am better able for it than a wee boy. I’ll be all right.’

Father O’Brien suddenly felt immeasurably sorry for the woman in front of him. She’d been wilful and headstrong all of her growing up, a trial for the nuns who’d had the teaching of her since she’d been small. He was glad she was retuning to her husband, but for all that . . . ‘Well, I’m glad you’ve seen sense at last, Maeve,’ he said.

‘Seeing sense, is that what they call it?’ Maeve said sarcastically. ‘I’m sorry, Father, but really I’m not returning to Brendan through choice, but because you’ve forced me. I’m not going to argue with you over it now. I’ve agreed to go back. Let it lie there.’

The priest gave a nod. ‘When will you leave?’

‘Oh, as soon as it can be arranged,’ Maeve said. ‘Now the decision has been made, there is no point in delaying things, is there?’

The priest nodded again and Maeve went on, ‘And you will write immediately to Father Trelawney?’

‘I will, I assure you.’

‘So, I’ll say goodbye, Father,’ Maeve said.

The priest put out his hand and Maeve looked at it, but made no effort to take it. The silence stretched between them as her glance shifted from the outstretched hand to the priest’s face.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I cannot shake hands with a man I have no respect for.’

She saw the priest’s face flush with anger and embarrassment. She knew her words had shaken him and she also knew he’d probably never forgive her. She walked across the floor and opened the door. Father O’Brien watched her go but did not move, nor did he call his sister to see her out, and once outside Maeve let her breath out in a huge sigh and the tears rolled down her cheeks.

She tramped the hills for hours, seeing no one and glad of it, for the tears continued to flow and she gazed about her as she drank in the space and peace around her. She knew it might have to last her a lifetime.

Eventually, emotionally exhausted but with dry eyes, and her feelings so tightly in check that every part of her body ached, she returned to the farmhouse to tell her family what she’d done.

EIGHT

Brendan and Father Trelawney were waiting to meet Maeve at New Street station on the evening she returned home in the middle of June 1939. The journey had been horrendous and she’d been as sick as ever on the ferry, but as she’d been sick with misery and despair since she’d left, it hardly mattered. The vision of her solemn parents and tearful children haunted her throughout the journey back to Birmingham.

Father Trelawney treated her as if she was a valued guest and not an errant wife returning because she had to, and Brendan barely acknowledged her. Yet she was glad of the priest’s presence, knowing while he was there Brendan could do little to her, and when he suggested going home with them both to talk things over, she accepted it, though never could she remember ‘talking things over’ with Brendan.

Everything looked dirtier and drabber than Maeve remembered as she came out of New Street station flanked by the two men and got into an uncomfortable tram for the short ride home. Latimer Street was full of children playing out in the summer evening, and many women stood at their doorways opening on to the street, talking to their neighbours. As they became aware of Maeve, all conversation ceased and most of the women’s eyes were sympathetic, but Maeve kept her head down and acknowledged none of them.

They turned down the entry into the court, where Maeve was surprised to see Elsie’s door shut and the windows closed. She’d written Elsie a letter telling her that she was being forced to return but, knowing how she’d feel about it, had only posted the letter the previous day. But it should have arrived that morning, and Maeve was surprised her friend wasn’t there to greet her and hoped it wasn’t because she was cross with her for coming back. Maeve felt her spirits sink. She hadn’t realised how much she’d been looking forward to seeing Elsie again.

Father Trelawney saw her glance at Elsie’s house and said, ‘Mrs Phillips is away at her sister’s in Handsworth. She was taken bad and Mrs Phillips went over a couple of days ago.’

Maeve said nothing, but she saw the hard cruel smile on Brendan’s face and was afraid. She knew it was the thought of Elsie next door that had saved her many a time. Brendan couldn’t stand Elsie and told her so often, but she didn’t give a damn and was one of the few people who seemed unafraid of him. When Brendan started on her Maeve knew those around would tut and say something should be done, but no one would interfere, and she shivered in sudden apprehension.

The step into the house was nearly black and the house itself smelt musty and was covered in a film of dust. Maeve remembered Elsie telling her that Brendan had been living at his mother’s – not that he’d have done anything to clean the house even if he had been living in it; he wouldn’t have had a clue where to start. Maeve longed to boil up some water and attack the place and knew she would as soon as she was alone, but for now Father Trelawney was there and wanting to ‘talk things over’ and she knew she’d have to humour the man.

She wondered if there was a bite to eat in the house, but before she was able to ask, Father Trelawney said, ‘Brendan has got in a few basics, Maeve, and I suggest you put the kettle on, and Brendan and I will go out and treat the three of us to pie and chips.’

Maeve stared at him. Never had she tasted a pie from the chip shop. She’d seen them and smelt them, but never tasted one. Once she’d been in Elsie’s house when her husband came in and Elsie had brought him chips and a steak-and-kidney pie from the chippy. The crust of the pie had been golden brown and when Alf cut into it, the sight of the chunks of meat in the thick appetising-looking gravy had made her feel faint. She’d had nothing to eat that day, her stomach had grumbled with emptiness, and she’d known there was little in her house to make a meal of. She’d had to make an excuse to Elsie and leave before she was tempted to grab the pie from Alf’s plate and shove it in her own mouth.

‘That would be grand, Father,’ she said, her mouth watering at the thought of it. She was grateful, for everything looked better if you had a full stomach. And she was glad too that Father Trelawney was taking Brendan with him. She’d be on her own with him long enough, God alone knew, and she was terrified, bloody terrified, but she pushed such fears to the back of her mind, filled the kettle and laid the table for the meal.

Neither the incongruousness of the situation nor the presence of the priest and her brooding husband could take her enjoyment away from the delicious pie and crispy chips, which she forced herself to eat slowly. She hadn’t known she was so hungry before she began, and the food and tea revived her. She was quite happy to let Father Trelawney carry the conversation.

It was with the meal over, the plates stacked for washing up and a second cup of tea before them that the priest began to talk about their ‘marriage difficulties’.

Maeve had almost smiled at such a polite term. She knew this was her one chance with the presence of the priest to stay Brendan’s hand, to improve even slightly the life she’d fled from and to put her side of the story. As she’d implied to Father O’Brien, Brendan was a violent man and this she could never change. She had to look at what she could do something about. Most of her problems related to money, because with the children out of the way, she could probably put up with Brendan’s uncertain temper as long as she got enough to feed herself and the child she was carrying. ‘Some of my “difficulties” as you call them, Father – really the main ones – are related to money, or the lack of it,’ she said suddenly.

‘Here we go,’ Brendan said. ‘Always bloody complaining.’

‘Now, Brendan, let her have her say.’

Encouraged by this, Maeve said, ‘Whatever Brendan earns, I’m never given enough of it to feed the family.’

‘Is it my fault if she’s a bad manager?’ Brendan said, appealing to the priest.

‘A bad manager?’ Maeve exclaimed, and turning to Father Trelawney said, ‘Father, I don’t know exactly how much Brendan earns, but I know it’s more than adequate for our needs. I know because of the amount he tips down his neck each evening, but he throws a pittance on the table on a Friday if I’m lucky, and I have a lot to pay out of it. It’s never enough.’

‘She’s always bloody moaning on, Father,’ Brendan put in.

‘Let her finish,’ Father Trelawney said. ‘Go on, Maeve.’

‘Father,’ Maeve began, glad for once he appeared to be on her side, ‘our rent for this place is six and six. I then have to pay one and sixpence a week for the clothing club and ten shillings for other things besides food: soap, soap powder and soda, money for the gas meters, candles and coal for the winter. I should pay sixpence a week for the doctor but I never have it, but those are the basic things before the food I have to buy.’

Father Trelawney had been writing the figures down as Maeve spoke and he looked up at Brendan and said, ‘How much do you give Maeve each week?’

Maeve knew it was never a set amount she was given a week, only what she could manage to wheedle out of him, but she sat silent and waited for him to speak. He blustered at first and said, ‘Well, Father, it’s not so easy to say. Not just like that, you understand. I mean it’s up to what I have to pay up and what I’m due.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He means the gambling debts he runs up, Father,’ Maeve said. ‘And of course the little amount he wins back. Whether we all eat or not will often depend on how well the horses run.’

‘You bitch!’ Brendan cried, leaping to his feet, his fists balled by his side. He stabbed his finger in the air towards Maeve and appealed to the priest. ‘You see how she is, Father. She’s a sodding troublemaker – beg your pardon, Father.’

Father Trelawney spoke sternly: ‘Sit down, Brendan.’ And he waited till Brendan was seated before he went on, ‘From my reckoning the very least Maeve can manage on is three pounds ten shillings. Are you giving her that sort of money?’

Maeve gave a snort of disbelief. Sometimes she was hard-pressed to prise a pound note out of her husband. Brendan turned hate-filled eyes upon her and said, ‘A man has to have a drink, Father. You know in the job I have if you didn’t drink you’d die, and what harm is a wee bet?’

‘Jesus, Brendan, will you listen to yourself?’ Maeve cried, encouraged by the priest’s presence to speak at last. ‘You can drink the pubs dry for all I care if you’ll tip up your money before you go and spend what you have left. I don’t give a tuppenny damn what you do with the rest if you just give me enough to warm and light the house and feed everyone.’

‘Feed everyone!’ Brendan mocked. ‘You’ve no weans now. You’ve left them at your mother’s to spite me.’

‘There’s a war coming, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Maeve said. ‘Our children are safer where they are. But I am pregnant again now and this one I want to give birth to and rear decently.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Work it out,’ Maeve snapped. ‘I miscarried two after Grace in the early months and then lost a baby at six months.’

‘Are you saying that was my fault?’

Maeve saw Brendan’s eyes glittering and knew she was on dangerous ground but was too angry to care. ‘Yes, I bloody well am. The first two were lost because I hadn’t the food in my body to feed them nor any resistance against the clouts and punches you seem to think are part of married life. But the last one,’ she added, ‘was lost because of a kick from a hobnail boot in my stomach.’

She stood up and faced Brendan, her face crimson with temper and yelled across the table, ‘You killed my unborn babies, Brendan Hogan, and near killed wee Kevin and me too. I returned to you only because I was forced. If anything happens to this child, I will hold Father Trelawney and Father O’Brien responsible for making me come back to you, and I’ve told Father O’Brien this.’

‘Maeve—’ Father Trelawney began.

‘Maeve bloody nothing, Father,’ Maeve snapped. ‘You don’t know how it is, neither of you priests does. I have to protect my children the only way I can.’

Brendan didn’t speak. But the glare he directed at her and the way he licked his lips slowly made her insides somersault in alarm. She closed her eyes, shutting out his face. Oh sweet Jesus, she cried silently, protect me for pity’s sake.

When she opened her eyes, Father Trelawney was regarding her gently. ‘Maeve, to lose a baby must be appalling and very sad for you, but you must believe your miscarriages were accidents – tragic accidents, but just that. To apportion blame will not help you.’

‘Apportion blame!’ Maeve repeated. ‘Father, I—’

But the priest cut her off. ‘Let’s return to the present and what can be done to help you both work towards a good marriage.’

Maeve stared at him, too angry to speak. Father Trelawney apparently was not going to talk about her miscarriages, nor agree that Brendan had had any hand in them at all. And as for the term ‘good marriage’, she’d stopped believing in that fantasy many years before. She didn’t expect happiness; just to be free of fear for the safety of her unborn baby, and have enough money to feed the family was all she desired now.

‘As I said before, I think Maeve should have three pounds and ten shillings a week,’ Father Trelawney said. ‘That will still leave you with a fair amount.’

Brendan gaped at him. ‘Three pounds bloody ten?’

Maeve looked at the priest in surprise. It wasn’t a fortune, but more than she’d ever got before, though she knew it wouldn’t happen. Brendan would agree to it, maybe, while the priest was there, but Father Trelawney wouldn’t be there on a Friday evening when Maeve risked a thumping to get some money off him before he left the house again to drink and gamble the night away. Often the amount he’d throw at her in the end was barely enough to clear the tick she’d run up in Mountford’s.

But Father Trelawney surprised her. ‘And I’d like you to bring it to the presbytery on Friday after work,’ he went on. ‘I’ll bring it up to Maeve myself later that evening.’

Maeve felt the breath leave her body in a large sigh of relief. Not to have to fight for money would be like heaven. Even when she’d managed to get some money out of Brendan, she’d often gone to bed light-headed and aching with hunger herself, for the little food she’d managed to buy she’d given to the children. To think all that might be over was magic indeed; to think she might carry her baby to term and as well nourished as any other in that area was a relief.

Maeve saw by Brendan’s glare that he was not pleased by what the priest said, but she knew he felt too awed by the clergy to go against him. ‘Do you agree, Brendan?’ the priest asked.

‘There’s no need for all this, Father.’

‘Well, we’ll see. But for now, do you agree?’

Brendan made an impatient movement with his head. ‘Aye, aye. I suppose so. You’ve forced it on me.’

‘And you, Maeve. Are you agreeable?’

‘Aye, Father. It would be a blessing, so it would.’

‘And why wouldn’t it?’ Brendan cut in sarcastically. ‘She takes off when the notion takes her and returns without a bone of shame in her body and makes demands. And you, Father, you encourage her and with not a word about how she’s behaved.’

‘That’s in the past, Brendan,’ the priest said. ‘The thing now is to look forward.’ He got to his feet and nodded to the pair of them. ‘I’m sure we can work something out.’ And to Maeve he added, ‘I’ll be around with the money on Friday evening, Maeve.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘And, Brendan?’

‘I’ll be there, Father,’ Brendan growled. ‘Leave it so.’

The priest said not another word and Maeve only waited until the door shut after him before beginning to tidy up the table, ignoring Brendan, who still sat there brooding.

‘So,’ he said at last, ‘you conniving bitch, you have it all your own way.’

Maeve ignored him and he roared. ‘D’you hear what I say?’

Her insides jumped with fright, but she answered him steadily, ‘Yes, I hear you. I’m not deaf.’

Brendan shot up from his chair and, reaching his wife’s side in a second, twisted one of her arms up her back until she cried out with the pain of it. ‘Not deaf?’ he said. ‘Bloody insolent. I’ll show you who’s master here.’

He thrust Maeve from him as he spoke and she saw him fumbling with the loops on his belt. She cried, ‘You touch me with that and I’ll be off to St Catherine’s in the morning and bring the priest up to you.’

The punch hit her between the eyes and knocked her off her feet and she stumbled against the hearth and lay against the mantelpiece, trying to pull herself together.

‘Bring the priest,’ Brendan sneered. ‘There’s not one man around these doors will blame me for the hiding I’m going to give you. You made a bloody mug of me, working in the corner shop to get the money to leave. I was told after you left me – in fact the whole bloody place knew about it but me. All laughing at me, they were, and you most of all. Well, you won’t have reason to laugh when I’m finished with you.’

Maeve was more scared than ever. She wasn’t surprised that Brendan had found out about her job once she was away from the place. She’d been surprised it had been kept from him for so long. But as he saw it, she, and indeed all the rest of the women, by keeping quiet about it had been laughing up their sleeves at him and he never could bear being laughed at. She also knew that however good her reasons were for leaving Brendan, every man would agree that a wife couldn’t be allowed to walk out whenever she chose, and any that did should be taught a lesson they’d never forget to discourage others feeling the same way. She knew even if she were to scream blue murder those women would pretend they heard nothing.

There was no Elsie to save her this time, and Maeve saw with horror the glittering fire in Brendan’s eyes. Violence brought out a frenzied excitement in him and she watched as he slid his belt through the last loop of his trousers and raised it in the air.

Maeve let out a yelp as the belt cut into her shoulder, and then with a sudden leap she was the other side of the table. The room, as she viewed it through her puffy eyes, refused to stay still, and Brendan appeared to sway in front of her as she spat out, ‘Leave me be. If I lose this baby, I will be along to Father Trelawney so fast my feet won’t touch the floor. I’ve told him I’ll hold him responsible – him and Father O’Brien – and I’ll show them what you’ve done to me.’

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