Chapter 3
Richard sat beside the fire in his study thinking about his wife. She had been bored and disparaging ever since her arrival at Dunderrig. He had hoped that the twins would soften her heart, but it hadn’t happened. He tried to pinpoint the time when she had turned into this cold, snobbish person.
She had been such a beautiful, quiet, serene kind of girl. Such a restful person to be around, that he had decided only two weeks after meeting her at that hospital dance in England that she was the girl for him. He wasn’t much of a dancer, but Jeremy had convinced him to have a night out. They had almost finished their training in Beauford Hospital, in Bristol, and Jeremy was planning to join up as soon as he qualified. There was a girl that Jeremy had had his eye on all week, and he was determined to have a crack at her. Richard was used to his friend falling for a new girl every few days; he also knew Jeremy would not let him rest until he agreed to accompany him to the dance. It was easier just to give in.
Richard had never had much success with girls. He had always envisaged himself married, but the process of becoming so seemed a bit of a mystery. There were a few girls at home in Dunderrig who were chatty and seemed friendly, but he was painfully shy and clammed up whenever a girl approached him. Since meeting Jeremy, it had become even harder for him to meet anyone – the girls were always dazzled by his handsome and vivacious friend, while he himself faded into the background.
He had seen Edith straight away when he walked in. He had plucked up the courage to speak to her after he heard her ordering a cup of tea in an Irish accent. She had been visiting an elderly relative in Bristol and had been convinced to attend the dance by her cousin. They danced several times that night, and Richard was sure he had never seen a girl as beautiful. They had gone to tea the following day and for a walk afterwards. She seemed to be happy to discuss issues of the day but rarely answered a direct question, and made very few demands on him emotionally; often they just strolled in comfortable silence.
Yet on their fifth date, as they walked through the Clifton area of Bristol, he had inquired about her parents. And after some hesitation, she had told him that her mother had died when she was still a child and that her father had become everything to her. Then, after much prompting, she told him her father’s story. He had been a professor of English and History in University College Dublin, who regularly spoke out against the horrendous living conditions endured by the working classes. He had supported Jim Larkin in encouraging the workers’ strike of 1913 and had been addressing a rally when a riot erupted between the crowd and the police. Badly injured in the ensuing melee, he had died a week later of his wounds.
The normally serene Edith became visibly upset as she spoke, and he realised then how difficult it was for her to discuss such emotional issues. There had been minimal physical contact between them up to that point, but there, in the middle of the street, he had held her in his arms and comforted her. That was the turning point; she was so vulnerable and beautiful, and he decided he wanted to take care of her always.
After that initial fortnight in Bristol, they arranged to stay in touch when Edith returned to Dublin. He was working hard in the hospital, gaining experience before deciding his next move. He’d always intended to return to Dunderrig and take over the practice from his father, but the old doctor wasn’t yet ready to retire and besides, meeting Edith had made him rethink. She seemed very settled in Dublin and so, after a few months of letters, and an occasional meeting, he had accepted a locum position in Kingstown. Edith had been so pleased. He had proposed in Stephen’s Green, and she had agreed happily. He smiled ruefully at the memory. Nothing he did seemed to please her these days.
Those days in Dublin seemed a lifetime ago now. Edith had been happy and busy then; she had continued her interest in matters political, and he was so absorbed in his work that he was only glad she had a wide circle of friends to keep her occupied. Many of them were well-known literary and political figures – people who had known her father. Occasionally they came to the house for dinner or drinks; yet while Richard did his best, he found their conversation about the Irish cause a little wearisome. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but these academics and writers seemed so far removed from the common people they purported to represent. He contributed very little to these conversations, and he knew his lack of enthusiasm embarrassed Edith. They never argued, but he remembered one such dinner at a grand house in Ballsbridge, when he’d explained to an artist sitting on his left that while Irish independence was of course something to aspire to, it wasn’t worth one drop of blood. He said that negotiation and dialogue was the only way and that he hoped a peaceful solution could be found.
He would never forget the looks from their fellow diners; it was as if he’d just said something incredibly rude or vulgar. Edith was furious with him and didn’t speak to him all the way home. From them on he didn’t attend those dinners – much to the relief of them both. They rubbed along well together, while not seeing too much of each other.
And that was where everything would have stayed, had he not received that letter from Jeremy describing the conditions in the hospital in Amiens. It was not in the true Jeremy style; his letters were usually about his passion for the gorgeous Solange. Before he’d convinced her to marry him, he had regularly asked Richard’s opinion about how to get her to see him as someone serious, rather than a playboy. Richard found the idea of Jeremy asking him for advice ridiculous. Jeremy was the one who could talk to women. He himself could barely manage a romantic relationship with his own wife.
This latest letter was in a different vein, however, as Jeremy described the kind of injuries the young men at the front were sustaining and how supplies and staffing levels were woefully inadequate. He wrote too of the horrors suffered by so many Irishmen in the bloodbath of the Somme – many of them from the Munster Fusiliers regiment, from Richard’s native West Cork. Suddenly, the idea of going to France, making a difference and helping his own countrymen seemed the logical thing to do. He asked his parents if Edith could live with them in Dunderrig while he was in France, and they agreed at once. The idea that his wife would refuse never crossed his mind.
‘No,’ she said calmly, when he had finished.
‘No? No to what? To Dunderrig? Look Edith, I know you have your friends here, but I can’t leave you here alone and unprotected.’
‘It’s true that I do not want to go to Dunderrig. My life is here. I am helping, doing something worthwhile, something my father would be proud of. But nor do I want you putting on a British uniform and fighting for their King.’ She spoke slowly, but with steeliness to her tone he had never heard before.
‘But Edith, my dear, I won’t be fighting. I’m a doctor. I will be working in a hospital. Tending to the wounded. I don’t have any political opinions about it; I simply want to help. Irish boys are out there too, you know, thousands of them. Please try to understand, I love you, but I have to go. And while I’m gone, I want you to be safe.’ He was aware he was pleading.
She looked as if she was weighing up whether or not to continue. Her voice held a bitterness he’d never heard from her before. ‘Yes, Richard. There are thousands of Irishmen fighting. Thousands of traitors to their own country. If they were so anxious to fight for something, then why not here, on their own soil, for their own people? You know how I feel about the British, and everything they stand for. Their puppet police murdered my father. Murdered him, Richard, for having the courage to speak out. I cannot support you putting that uniform on your back. Frankly, I’m shocked that you would even consider it. The Rising might have ended in disaster, but we are not beaten. Already we are working on getting our men out of British gaols, and when they come home, I want to be here, in Dublin. Here is where you should be, looking after your own, not risking your life and wasting your skills in a country that has nothing to do with us. I am asking you, as your wife, not to do this.’
Richard felt as if he were seeing her for the fi
rst time – he had been so busy with the practice, he hadn’t realised how deeply she had become involved with the volunteers. Since the Rising the previous Easter, the city had been on tenterhooks. It seemed to him now that her support of an Irish republic could only get her into trouble, and that it was more important than ever that she relocate to the peaceful backwater of Dunderrig while he was away in France and unable to protect her.
He tried at first to reason with her, ‘Edith, I do understand your loyalty to your father. He was an honourable and brave man, but really, this is no environment for a woman, let alone one whose husband is away. I love you, and I want you to be safe. Please try to understand my reasons for going. I don’t agree with war – I hate it, in fact – but medicine is not about ideology. The boys and men who are suffering need me to help them. I’m sorry you are unhappy, but I must insist that you go to Dunderrig. I would be out of my mind with worry were you to stay here.’
She looked at him with disgust, and from that moment on, she rebuffed all efforts he made to be conciliatory. They had driven to Dunderrig in silence a few weeks later, and everything he said was greeted with monosyllabic responses. His parents went to great lengths to make their daughter-in-law welcome, yet Edith showed them the same level of disdain she now did Richard. His father had taken him aside and questioned him what was the matter, had they done something wrong? Richard didn’t wish to explain. He simply said that Edith would need to get used to country living, and that would take time – he was sure they would be a comfort to Edith, and she to them. Then, with a heavy heart, he set sail for England.
FOR RICHARD, THE WAR passed in a haze of noise and blood. There was nothing glorious or noble about it, just the daily – and nightly – grind of trying to patch together the broken bodies with which he was constantly presented. He tried to get home on leave to see Edith, but he’d only managed it twice. He wrote long letters, but she replied only with short notes – answering all questions he asked her, but with absolutely no warmth. Still, she had met with unexpected enthusiasm the news that he was coming home on leave in the May of 1918, and announced she was coming to Dublin to meet him off the boat. He half-suspected his wife was more interested in seeing Dublin than in seeing him. He had heard from his mother that she often travelled up to the city, staying with friends overnight. He supposed there was no harm in it. It must be dull for a young woman to be stuck in a house with his elderly parents and no one her own age to befriend. He knew some of his old school friends’ wives had made efforts to include her in their social circle, but it seemed she was still very much a Dublin girl. He told himself that when he returned home and the war was over, they would patch up their marriage, hopefully have children, and all would be well. By then she would have forgiven him.
They arranged to meet in the Bayview Hotel in Kingstown. They had often gone there for dinner in the early days of their marriage, so he hoped the location would rekindle their love. When Richard arrived at the hotel, around seven o’clock in the evening, he had expected to find her dressed for a night out. Instead, he was surprised to be greeted by his wife wearing a negligee and even more delighted to find her in an amorous mood. They’d made love quickly and silently. Richard would have liked to remain in bed with her, but she was determined that they go down to dinner. She never asked about his life in France. A group of her friends were waiting for them in the dining room. Hiding his disappointment, he made light conversation. His wife had taken up smoking and kept abandoning him for the terrace of the sea-front hotel, yet he was so happy to see her animated and smiling again that he indulged her, and agreed to her suggestion that they stay in the hotel for a few more days before travelling to Dunderrig. Although his leave was suddenly cut short before he could get home to see his parents, he had returned to France with a lighter heart. In her next, very short letter she had told him she was pregnant. He was overjoyed, although worried that she herself expressed no pleasure in the news.
THE DEATHS OF HIS parents from influenza came as a shocking blow to him. It happened only weeks after he’d been in Ireland, and he was crushed not just by grief but also by guilt that he had been in the country but hadn’t managed to travel down to Dunderrig to see them. If he hadn’t agreed to stay those extra days in Kingstown… He wrote long letters to Edith, describing his pain as best he could but, while she commiserated, he could tell that the death of the old couple meant much more to their housekeeper Mrs Canty and her husband Eddie than to his own wife. He longed to go home but could not get leave. John and Juliet Buckley were buried in the cemetery in the village without their only child there to say goodbye.
As the war wore on wearyingly to its end, the waves of wounded growing daily, Richard received a second, longer letter from Edith:
Dear Richard,
I hope you are well and that you will be home safely before too long. The house is very quiet without your parents, though Mrs Canty does her best to fill it with her relentless prattle. I am well, though I have been feeling quite nauseous. Mrs Canty’s boiling of cabbage does little to help that situation. I have not been up to Dublin in some time, so I have no news about anything there. I am under the care of Dr Bateman from Cork. The child will be born in January sometime, he thinks. I hope you will have returned by then. I know we have had our differences, Richard, but now that we are to be parents I think we should make the best of it for the sake of our child.
Fond regards,
Your wife,
Edith.
James felt great relief. Fond regards… Impending motherhood had clearly softened her. The war was in its final stages, he was sure of it, and he would return to Dunderrig, take over the practice, and raise his family with Edith. Everything would be all right.
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Acknowledgements
This story was a labour of love for me. In literature, the futility of war is a recurring theme, and a popular one. War is a destructive, violent force that destroys people and countries and yet without conflict, and the blood that was shed on this island, the reality of my existence as a citizen of the Irish Republic would be unlikely.
The notion of giving your life for a national cause forms part of the literature, poetry and song of virtually every civilization on earth, but to actually do it, to be willing to die, to leave all that you love so that others might enjoy a level of freedom denied to previous generations is something that must give us pause for thought, whatever the cause.
I am grateful for the fact that I have never had to say goodbye to someone I loved before sending them to war, but researching this book has given me an insight into that most tragic of partings. The unimaginable pain of mothers in particular, who have spent their lives protecting their children, to then knowingly allow them to go where they could be wounded or even killed is, for me, and I imagine all mothers, inconceivably horrific.
Mine is a typical Irish family. My great-grandfather, Pierce Kearns was a stretcher bearer with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the Western Front during World War One, my great grand-uncle, his brother, was in the Irish Republican Army. Another grand-uncle on another branch of the family tree was imprisoned for Republican activities during the War of Independence in the early twenties. In the 1950’s when opportunities for advancement or employment were few in Ireland, my aunts and uncles, like so many young Irish people, went to England in search of a better life. They settled there and that country was good to them. My cousins are British and proud, and so they should be.
My family is more the norm than the exception. The centuries old relationship between Ireland and Britain is bloody and complex and our stories are inextricably linked. Throughout the centuries so many lives were lost on this island, and they were all, irrespective of nationality, some mother’s child.
This story is told from the Irish perspective, and from the point of view of those who fought and died that we could be a sovereign nation, and is dedicated to them.
I would like to express my t
hanks to my editor Helen Falconer, without whom this story wouldn’t work.
To my dream team of first readers, Tim, Beth-Anne, Hilda, Joseph, Jim and Tracey who each help me in your own unique and invaluable way.
To Vivian, my sincere thanks and gratitude that you never retired your red biro.
To Millie Samuelson, whose generosity to a total stranger will never be forgotten.
To my family, friends and readers who have encouraged me to keep writing, your unfailing enthusiasm for my stories really is the fuel for the fire. Thank you all.
My children, Conor, Sórcha, Éadaoin and Siobhán, still my greatest achievements.
And finally, to the piper, the reason for it all.
Jean Grainger
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Under Heaven’s Shining Stars
Copyright © 2016 by Jean Grainger
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This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, or events used in this book are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, alive or deceased, events or locales is completely coincidental.
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