But people did engage in pre-marital sex. I was proof of that. I wondered how did he see me in this context? I didn’t ask him but I believed that he did not hold me in very high regard. It was the teaching of the Catholic Church in those days that illegitimate children had to pay for the sins of their parents, with their own suffering. The nuns at the orphanage told me that, frequently. I heard that message so often, that I detest hearing it, in any context, to this very day.
How did Harry view my parents?
All his life he was indoctrinated in the teachings and propaganda of the Catholic Church. It inculcated itself in Harry to such a degree that to this day he thoroughly believes himself to be a far superior human being to people who are not supporters of, or who have fallen foul of, the Catholic Church’s rules and regulations. My parents were an example of sinners who had broken its laws, by indulging in sexual relations with one another, while unmarried. If he had known them at the time, he would have regarded them, as sinners of the highest order. I’m sure he would have seen them as unfit to consort with, at any level. I, as their product, would not have rated much higher. And there, the dichotomy introduces itself. I should have realised it at the time, but didn’t. I continued on with the plans for the wedding, unaware.
There was no love between us. The word love was never mentioned. The same feeling that I had for George did not develop in this relationship. The feeling of wanting to be with someone special, all the time, did not exist. I just knew that I wanted to be married and to have children. All my friends were getting married, so I assumed that it was the normal, natural and proper thing to do. Harry must have assumed the same thing, as he never once told me that he loved me during our engagement.
During the Christmas holidays of 1972, I was working most of the time. I would work so that other nurses with young families, who would prefer to be at home with them over Christmas, did not have to miss out. I was not bitter about working the unsociable Christmas shift-hours. London was a cosmopolitan city, as opposed to the incestuous, Catholic-dominated atmosphere of Ireland, at that time. On the wards there were many nurses of different religious backgrounds, to whom working over Christmas was just another day. As I had no family to visit, it was better for me to have the distraction of work. The girls in the flat had all gone home to visit their families, so I had the entire place to myself.
I worked the 8 am to 5 pm shift on Christmas Day and went back to the flat after work. Harry had Christmas dinner with his brother Paddy and his wife, and was due to come and see me at the flat later in the evening. I hadn’t been invited but I was on-call anyway with a nurses’ agency. As he arrived I had just finished cooking my own Christmas dinner. It consisted of two sausages. That was all that was edible in the flat at the time. It sounds very meagre fare for Christmas, but I was not one bit bothered.
Harry arrived and we listened to some music. After an hour or two had passed, an extraordinary thing happened. He compromised himself and his strict adhesion to Catholic moral standards. He made advances towards me. I was unprepared for such an approach and also shocked. It was totally out of character for Harry.
‘What are you trying to do?’ I asked.
‘I want to have intercourse with you,’ he replied.
I quickly made it known to him that his advances were being rejected. Having sex with me was definitely out of the question.
‘It won’t matter, I’ll marry you anyway,’ he persisted.
‘No way,’ I replied. ‘It cannot happen.’
‘All right so,’ he huffed.
With that, he sucked in his breath, stuck out his chest, turned and marched across the room, slammed the front door with an almighty crash as he left. We managed to patch things up after this, but sex or ‘intercourse’ in Catholic Church terminology, as used by Harry, was never mentioned again between us while we were engaged.
Over the years, I had written to Father Bernard regularly, but not as often as previously. I had gone to see him in July in Glenstal when I got engaged and told him that I was getting married to Harry and that the ceremony was to take place in the spring of 1973. Father Bernard said that he was so pleased for me and insisted that he would perform the ceremony, wherever it might be.
When we had announced our engagement in July 1972, we had arranged to be married in St John’s Cathedral in Kilkenny City in Ireland on February 24, 1973.
A wedding breakfast and reception for 50 guests was also booked at the time. I had wanted to have a small quiet ceremony in London without fuss. But when Harry’s parents heard that their youngest son was to be married, they insisted that it had to be at home in Ireland. While they insisted on the geographical location, they did not insist that they would pay for any of the expenses. I had to fund everything.
In the lead-up to our nuptials, the number of uninvited players in my life increased. I had no control over who they might be. I had no guidance from anyone about how to handle the unexpected intrusion into my life of so many new, unknown people.
First of all, was the arrival in my life of Harry’s parents. They turned out to be a couple in their mid-sixties. They made a poor but honest living on the home farm, which was now being run on a daily basis by one of Harry’s brothers. They were a conservative, uneducated, but pleasant couple, who lived their lives according to the strict moral teachings of the Catholic Church. They were not unusual in the rural Ireland of the early 1970s.
As I was now going to be a permanent fixture in Harry’s life and, more importantly, as I would be his legal wife, problems arose. The first problem had been Harry actually telling his parents that he was going to get married. As most of the remainder of his 11 brothers and sisters were already married, I hadn’t thought that Harry getting married would come as a great shock to his parents. I assumed that they would accept it as fact and give him their blessing. In fact, at the time they didn’t seem very pleased, but we got over that. His father wrote me a letter a few months later to welcome me into the family.
The second problem was, of course, that he was not getting married to just anyone! He was marrying an ‘illegitimate girl’. Harry was under pressure.
‘’T’would kill Mam and Dad if I told them that I was getting married to a bastard,’ he announced to me one evening.
My heart sank. Here it was again. My past had come back to haunt me once more.
‘Tell them that my parents are dead,’ I offered immediately, without doubt or hesitation. I had used this explanation so often previously that it tripped off my tongue as easily as if I had available as proof in my handbag a validated copy of their death certificates, and a letter from the Pope to say that he himself had officiated at their burial.
‘That would be for the best,’ Harry accepted gratefully. ‘We won’t say anything to the brothers and sisters either, ’cos they wouldn’t approve if they knew the situation,’ he added, taking a mile, having been given an inch.
When I met both his parents for the first time, Harry introduced me to them and, barely pausing for breath, he added, ‘This is Celine that I am getting married to. Her parents are dead!’
It was his first denial of me.
I did not remark on it, but to hear myself introduced in such a manner, hurt me. I ignored the hurt and carried on with the pretence. After all, I had been the one to suggest it in the first instance. I felt so insignificant and of such a low social standing, that I would have agreed to any excuse about my parenthood. I wanted to be acceptable to his parents, and if my illegitimate status was so bad it might cause their premature demise, my parents were going to be dead first. It worked. Everyone just assumed that if my parents were dead, they must have been legally married to each other before they died. Once again we had ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’. And so it was that the entire Roberts family thought that my legally married parents were dead. I was therefore entitled to become Harry’s wife. While I understood about his parents, I could not really figure out why he could not tell some of his brothers and s
isters the truth about me. I also wondered why I was so acceptable to him and not the others. The bottom line was that he did not have the courage to tell anyone that mattered to him that I was illegitimate. It was for his own protection. He felt that he would have been lowering himself, in their eyes, if he had to declare my illegitimacy.
I have often thought over the years: ‘Who is he, to consider himself so important in the grand scheme of things, to deny me? Who are his family, that they are so important that I had to pretend that I was something I was not, just so their dignity would not be tainted by my existence?’ At the time though this did not bother me, as my goal was to get married and have children.
I was going to achieve that ambition, whatever it took.
Whatever we had to say to his family, to maintain the status quo, I would agree to it. The scandal, created among the neighbours in Graignamanagh, County Kilkenny, when it became known that the youngest son of Harry and Cathy Roberts was to marry an illegitimate girl, would have been too much to contemplate.
The day of the wedding finally arrived, February 24, 1973.
On the night before the wedding I stayed with one of Harry’s sisters, Alice. As Harry did not drink alcohol, he did not have a stag night. He stayed at his parents’ home, a few miles away. It was all planned between Harry and I, to be a very low-key wedding, an event to be got through, with a minimum of fuss.
On the morning of the wedding I was up at dawn. I could hardly sleep, as excitement, such as I had never allowed myself to experience previously, took over. First of all, the dresses! Under no condition was I wearing anything that was less than perfect. With my history of second-hand clothing from charitable organisations, there was no way that I was getting married in anything less than brand-new.
For months I had devoured women’s magazines, looking for suitable ideas for my wedding dress. Bride Magazine provided the answer. Their ‘Wedding Dress of the year 1973’ was the one for me. Nothing less would do. The dress was white, with lace on the cuffs and a low-cut neck. It was for sale from Berketex for £265 in London and I duly purchased it for my most special day, without the slightest consideration of the cost.
I had my own bridesmaids for the day. Breege Dolan, who was also a nurse and had trained with me, was my chief bridesmaid. Anastasia O’Mahoney, Harry’s niece, was the second one. I also had a page boy, Harry’s nephew. The bridesmaid dresses had been subject to the same level of pre-purchase search as my own. They turned out to be turquoise and white with a matching hat. All our shoes were white and plain enough, but they were as expensive as I could find. I did not want to be reminded of the time when I could not afford shoes at all. Their flowers were white carnations, with entwined ivy.
All organisation and preparation for the wedding was done by myself, or with the help of my friends. I had no family to help me. Part of my ‘manufactured’ family began to arrive at the house later that day. It consisted mainly of my previous employer Mrs Cooke’s extended family. Mrs Cooke’s health had deteriorated dramatically following surgery and she had died about two years after I had left her employment. I had gotten on very well with the entire family and had kept in touch with her relatives. They were very genuine, good people. If I could have looked upon any of my employers as being family, the Cookes were as close as it came. When they heard that I was getting married, they were thrilled and genuinely delighted for me.
Old Mrs Dillon, who was Joan Cooke’s mother, had asked me what I wanted as a wedding present. Without hesitation, and half in jest, I had replied, ‘A family.’
‘Without any parents,’ I had added cautiously.
‘I will be your grandmother,’ she said with a grin. ‘John, my son-in-law, will be your uncle,’ she added, obviously enjoying the proposed charade. ‘And Carmel, John’s wife, will be your aunt. What else do you need in the way of manpower? A chauffeur? A butler perhaps? I am really going to enjoy this wedding.’
John ‘my uncle’, who was to ‘give me away’ arrived early on the day, looking much the worse for alcoholic wear, from the night before in his favourite pub. He headed straight for the kitchen and became another liability for Alice. She had to cope with my hung-over ‘uncle’ and his ceaseless requests for more whiskey and copious amounts of tea, which he insisted he needed to drink to carry him through his ‘niece’s’ wedding day. Every time he mentioned ‘his niece’, he stared in my direction, catching my attention with a very exaggerated wink of his left eye, simultaneously accompanied by a short nod of the head. Every time he winked at me, all I could do was collapse with laughter.
My chief bridesmaid, Breege, could not be roused out of the bed. She had arrived from London, late the previous evening, also a bit the worse for alcoholic wear. She had travelled over with about five of my friends, who were all nurses in London hospitals. I think that there was quite a lot of alcohol drank on the journey from London to Kilkenny. Not all Irish nurses in London at that time were teetotallers! Six off-duty nurses on their way to a wedding in Ireland were quite a formidable force to contend with. But they promised that they would be on their best behaviour on the day of the wedding.
Alice and I dragged my hung-over bridesmaid out of the bed. Hot strong sweet tea, with a shot of Jameson whiskey added for fortification, did the trick. She was stuffed into her very expensive bridesmaid dress, which she had only tried on in London once before. The dress fitted perfectly. Breege had not put on an ounce of weight. She was pretty well ready. Anastasia, the other bridesmaid, had been waiting patiently the whole time and was ready. We had packed the page boy off with his father, so he was ready at the church.
My ‘uncle’ John was ready.
Alice was ready to leave.
I was the only one who was not ready. My hair was being done by a local stylist, and was taking ages.
Breege had joined John at the kitchen table, as he had produced a bottle of Bushmills whiskey. He was looking for willing assistants to help him drink the bottle dry. She was keen to accommodate him.
The place was in bedlam. It was now ten o’clock and I had to be in the church by eleven.
I eventually separated John and my chief bridesmaid from the, by now, half-empty bottle of whiskey. Outside, I bundled John, along with myself, into a waiting white Ford Zodiac. I had booked it as a wedding limousine to take us to the church and afterwards to the hotel. The February air was still and chilled, as we followed Alice’s husband’s tiny, post-war baby-Austin, with the bridesmaids inside. After three long miles, along the narrow road, twisting down the hill to the church, we arrived in convoy.
It was five past eleven. I was getting married, and I did not want to be too late, just in case Harry changed his mind.
There was no great excitement at the church. Michael, Harry’s brother, the best man, with his lean and angular good looks and self-assured cocky attitude, was already waiting at the door of the church. He smiled when he saw us arriving on schedule. He gave us a two-handed thumbs-up signal and disappeared into the gloom of the church entrance. He came out again almost immediately, brandishing an unfinished cigarette, to explain his hasty reappearance. It made a large arc through the air as he flicked it from between his fingers, to where it landed on the ground, close beside me. ‘Stub that out, will ya, before ya come in,’ he ordered with a grin, before he turned and disappeared once more into the darkness.
I ignored both the cigarette and the accompanying order as I took hold of my ‘uncle’ John’s proffered arm. We stopped in the entrance hall of the church. I took a deep breath, while John coughed up his lungs, the result of too many early-morning cigarettes. As our eyes met, in an eloquent look, the two of us moved off.
Breege held open the inner door, as we passed through. When she opened the door, the church organist began to play the leading strains of ‘Here comes the bride’.
One step in, ‘Oh sweet Jesus, where is my bouquet?’ I shrieked.
‘Oh Christ, it is in the holy water font,’ said Breege, as she rushed to get it. I had lef
t it there, as I smoothed out the imaginary wrinkles on my dress, before my triumphal march up the aisle.
‘Jaysus, it’s wringin’ wet,’ said Breege, as she manically shook the living daylights out of the once-pretty bunch of roses, intertwined with scented white hyacinth tips.
‘They will do as they are,’ I groaned, as I aggressively snatched them from her.
John shrugged his broad shoulders and inclined his head towards the altar as if to ask, ‘Are we ready now?’
Off we went again, on our second attempt at progress towards the contrasting brightly lit, high altar.
I noticed that the number of people on each side were somewhat unbalanced. On ‘my side’, on the left, were about six or seven of my colleagues from nursing, my ‘aunt’ Carmel and my ‘granny’, old Mrs Dillon. But on the right-hand side we were outnumbered by about five or six to one. We were running at 70 or more – so much for a small wedding! Harry’s relatives had appeared out of every nook and cranny, for Harry’s big day out. There was nothing that I could do about it now.
Father Bernard’s beaming, welcoming smile, beckoned. When we reached the gates of the railings that enclosed the altar area, John took hold of my hand and placed it in Harry’s hand. Harry had appeared, as if out of nowhere.
As John left me and moved away, time and space seemed to stop for me for an instant. A cold, clearly defined thought flashed through my mind. Its guilt-laden reality said to me, ‘That man who has just ‘given me away’ should have been my father!’ This was immediately followed by, ‘I wonder what he looks like?’ It was such a small instant in time but it really shook me. In 25 years of my life, I had never asked myself that question. On the few occasions that my father’s identity had arisen, for example, when in conversation with my minder, Sister Bernadette, it was always made into a non-issue. ‘Your father is now married with a family of his own, and if he were to find out about you, it would wreck the whole family,’ is what I was always told. Consequently, I never even thought about him.
No One Wants You Page 12