The Hamiltons of Ballydown

by Anne Doughty

  The eighth family party was one of the happiest days Rose had ever spent. She loved the spacious house in Armagh, the well-planted garden Mary had created, the rich green of the tree-lined Mall spread out beyond the sitting-room windows. Each time she visited that elegant room with its high ceilings and tall windows, she marvelled at the good fortune which had come to them out of the darkest of days.

  This year she felt it more than ever as she caught John sheepishly eyeing his two pretty daughters, Hannah, cool and slim, full of a gentle grace, Sarah, in her new flowered lawn dress, as tall as her sister and as dark as Hannah was fair, her eyes sparkling with excitement, totally absorbed in all that was going on around her.

  She couldn’t help but smile when she saw how comfortably John now stood beside James Sinton, their backs to the marble fireplace, the hearth glowing only with the bright colours of summer flowers. Now in his mid-forties, with grey hair at his temples, he carried himself as well as when he’d bought a coat in Dublin to wear at his wedding in Kerry.

  She looked from John to Sam. He was more like his father than Jamie, broad-shouldered and fuller in the body. He preferred to listen rather than talk. Red-headed and lighter in build, Jamie was much more ready to put himself forward, always talkative with people who could answer his questions. He was busy telling James about the recent big orders at the yard which were sure to lead to further expansion. The chance of a manager’s job when he finished his time in the drawing office was looking better than ever. Sam smiled, pleased his brother would succeed in getting what he so much wanted, but content enough himself. He already had what he’d wanted since ever he could remember.

  A perfect day, in every way, Rose and Mary agreed, their family party strung out ahead of them, as they strolled under the shade of the trees on The Mall. Sunlight poured down on the dazzling white figures moving back and forth over the smooth turf of the cricket pitch and the groups of men and boys watching from the long grass by the boundary.

  In front, Hannah and her particular friend, Helen, a year older and more than a head taller, had their arms round each others’ waists their heads close together in talk while they pushed Mary and James’s longed-for young son in his elegant perambulator. Sam was strolling shyly with Susie Sinton, just turned thirteen and clearly impressed by Sam’s broad shoulders and smart turn out. Behind them, she heard Jamie’s voice once again deep in conversation with James Sinton. Sarah and little Mary, the youngest of the Sinton girls, were standing on the low wall that divided the shady walk from the road beyond, so that John could point out the library where Rose had borrowed books for him when they lived at Salter’s Grange.

  Sarah and Mary knew the library perfectly well. It was John who’d never noticed that, whenever they happened to pass the small, elegant building, Sarah always asked the same question, Was that where Ma used to go for the books? She knew perfectly well he’d happily tell the story of how her mother had met James Sinton in the reading room one day, after the disaster, and how he’d found them all a new home and a new job with Uncle Hugh and how they’d all become friends and had a party every year ever after to celebrate their escape.

  The fine weather that blessed them on ‘the big day’, continued all through July and August with only a handful of cool, showery days to interrupt it. When Elizabeth and Hugh went off to Manchester for an important Quaker Conference, John had two weeks holiday. Jamie, who now got quite upset if anyone called him James, had his annual holiday at the same time. The first week he went on a cycling tour with his friends from work, the second, he came home. He and John cut the meadow behind the house, repaired the unused stable and visited the Armagh Horse Fair. They arrived home well pleased, having bought a good-natured chestnut mare called Dolly for the new trap. It was all very well, said John, for Hugh to go and order a motor carriage while he was in Manchester, but for the moment a pony and trap would do very nicely at Ballydown.

  At weekends and on the long summer evenings the new trap took them further afield than they’d been before. While John was at work, Rose drove Hannah and Sarah to picnic by the little loughs set amidst the green hills. They walked round the old church at Magherally and tried to read the oldest of the weathered tombstones. They went down to their own parish church of Holy Trinity and studied the memorials and monuments in its cool interior. After visiting Dromore cathedral, they stared up at the viaduct nearby marvelling at the graceful soaring arches that carried the railway from Belfast southwards. After a long moment, Sarah declared it was too difficult to sketch. What she wanted was a photographic camera like Mr Blennerhasset’s, the guest at Currane Lodge who’d sent her parents an album of photographs of their wedding.

  The fine weather faded gently into a mild autumn, the leaves lingering in tones of gold and russet with neither wind nor frost to loosen them and send them drifting under hedgerows. The mornings were misty and the evenings shorter, but there was no cold, no challenge from rain or wind to make the daily tasks a burden.

  When Hannah and Sarah went back to school and Dolly was left to lean over the five barred gate and wonder where they’d gone, Rose felt it strange to be alone again. For a few days she missed Sarah’s bright ideas and enthusiasms and the liveliness of her two daughters, but then she realised quite suddenly she was grateful for the quiet.

  ‘Well, what’s new in the world today,’ she asked with a smile, as John settled himself for a bite of lunch on a pleasant September day.

  ‘Oh, nothing good, according to Hugh,’ he said wryly. ‘He says he’d three copies of The Times to read last night full of the trouble in South Africa. The Boers are determined to have their way and rule themselves and our government is just as determined not to let them. He thinks there’ll be a war out of it if someone doesn’t talk sense to both sides.’

  ‘Do you think the Quakers will intervene?’ she asked, as she fetched bowls from the dresser and took them to the stove.

  ‘Like when they went to the Czar to try to stop the war in the Crimea,’ he replied, nodding to himself. ‘They’re certainly thinkin’ about it from what I hear. All the Monthly Meetings in Ireland are charged to consider what to do an’ they’ve written letters to Friends in America and in Europe forby. There’s not all that many of them, I know, but most of them’s educated people. You’d admire them for the trouble they put themselves to,’ he added, as she put a bowl of soup in front of him.

  ‘But you don’t think it’ll do much good?’ she said, looking over her shoulder as she filled her own bowl.

  ‘Ach, when one’s as bad as the other, there’s no come and go,’ he said shortly. ‘The Boers say they’ve the right to their own country after the trek they made to get away from the British. The British say they have no right to run against the law, keeping slaves and suchlike. But sure it all boils down to whose goin’ to benefit from the diamond mines. Whoever comes out top it won’t be the ordinary Africans,’ he said, sadly.

  Rose shook her head and buttered a slice of wheaten bread. James and Hugh Sinton read their newspapers assiduously. So for that matter did Elizabeth. She’d been surprised to find how much attention they paid to events on the other side of the globe.

  ‘You can’t run a business any more as if it were a local matter,’ Hugh explained, one evening when Rose asked him why he read the London papers so carefully. ‘Take what happened in the sixties, during the American Civil War. No raw cotton coming in to Lancashire, so the mills had to close. Mill owners were ruined and thousands of workers turned off. There were whole families where every one of them worked at the mill, so there wasn’t the price of a loaf coming in. There must have been poor souls who starved, though we’ll never know the extent of it. You don’t just get famine when the potato crop fails,’ he said shortly. ‘And while they suffered in Lancashire, we benefited here in Banbridge.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  Sarah, had been sitting so quietly on a low stool by her father’s chair that Rose hadn’t noticed it was well past her bedtime.

 
; ‘How could we benefit?’ she demanded, her dark eyes wide as she stared at Hugh and waited.

  ‘Manufacturers needed cloth, Sarah,’ he said, looking at her calmly. ‘They always need cloth. When they couldn’t get cotton they came to us for linen. The mills here were overwhelmed with orders, they couldn’t expand fast enough. They were so desperate for labour that even children of ten were taken on without too many questions being asked.’

  ‘Hannah’s ten and Sam’s nearly ten,’ she said, glancing at her brother and sister. ‘Would they have had to work in the mills?’

  ‘If their family was poor and encouraged them to,’ he said honestly.

  ‘Are we poor?’ she asked abruptly, looking at Hannah and Sam. ‘Ma, are we poor?’ she went on, her voice rising ominously.

  Rose had got to her feet and picked her up, feeling her small body stiffen as she twisted in her arms and turned back to stare at Hugh and Elizabeth sitting with her father by the stove.

  ‘No, Sarah dear, we’re not poor,’ she said soothingly. ‘You needn’t worry about that,’ she went on, as she carried her upstairs to bed.

  Hugh had come down the next day as soon as the children had gone to school to ask if Sarah had slept properly.

  ‘It was thoughtless of me to mention the children working in the mills, Rose,’ he said with a sigh. ‘You know we Quakers favour plain speaking even with children, and I know you think it a good thing yourself, but I should have been more careful. She’s too young to have to face the truth about such hardship. She’ll learn all about it soon enough.’

  ‘She’s fine this morning, Hugh,’ she replied warmly, touched by his concern. ‘She was chattering away at breakfast about a nativity play they’re rehearsing at school. But it’s a warning to me,’ she added ruefully. ‘I know she listens to everything that goes on, but sometimes I forget, because she always looks as if she’s not paying the slightest attention. No harm done, Hugh, but I’ll make sure I have the fire lit in the parlour next time you come down and we’ll leave the children the kitchen table for their games till bedtime.’

  ‘Lovely drop of soup, Rose,’ John said enthusiastically as he tipped his bowl to spoon up the last of it.

  ‘Would you like some more?’ she said, beaming. ‘There’s plenty.’

  He smiled and shook his head. He always ate lightly at lunch time even when he was very hungry. Bending over a model or working at the anvil in the afternoon could give you bad wind if you’d eaten too well.

  ‘D’you remember, Rose,’ he said thoughtfully, as he munched the rest of his wheaten bread, ‘yer Ma once told you that when she thought of yer father, God rest him, she always said to herself how pleased he’d be to know you were all well, that you’d enough to eat and weren’t in want?’

  ‘I’d forgotten that,’ Rose admitted, shaking her head. ‘You’ve a great memory. I never know what you’re going to come out with next.’

  ‘Ach, I forget plenty,’ he said, laughing quietly. ‘But I often think of what yer Ma said when I see you put out more bread or more butter. I know how your father musta felt. He lived through desperit hard times,’ he said, shaking his head at the thought of it. ‘We’ve had our share, I know, but nothin’ as bad as your Ma and Da. We’ve had great luck.’

  ‘Some might call it luck,’ she said sharply, as she stood up and pulled the kettle forward on the stove to make them a pot of tea. ‘You’ve worked for your luck. If you hadn’t studied so hard those years when you were with Thomas and then at the mill, you’d not be much use to Hugh.’

  ‘An’ what about all the wee dresses that kept us alive when the Orangemen took their work away from Thomas an’ me because we wouldn’t go out drillin’ with them?’ he retorted promptly.

  Rose smiled across at him and raised her eyebrows as she reached a hand up to the mantelpiece for the tea caddy. She heard the scrape of his chair as he moved from the table to his comfortable armchair.

  ‘Goodness, I forgot,’ she said suddenly, as she put the tea caddy back. ‘You’ve a letter. It came yesterday and I forgot all about it. I’m amazed Sarah didn’t spot it,’ she added, as she handed it down from its place by the clock. ‘At least we know it’s not the landlord putting us out.’

  John turned the envelope over, read the return address and smiled.

  ‘No, indeed it is not,’ he said firmly. ‘I know what this is and it might be the price of a new dress,’ he said, beaming at her. ‘It’s the Patent Office in London,’ he said, ripping open the envelope.

  She watched his face as he unfolded a stiff sheet of notepaper and extracted a slip of paper. She felt a sudden stab of anxiety as his eyes scanned whatever message it bore, his lips moving soundlessly.

  ‘What is it, John?’ she said urgently.

  He looked up at her, his eyes dilated, his mouth open. He handed her the slip of paper and sat back in his chair, the letter still in his hand.

  ‘What d’you say to that then?’ he asked, the first glimmer of a smile touching his lips.

  She set the teapot down again, came across to his chair, put her arms round him and kissed him.

  ‘I’d say, Congratulations, John Hamilton,’ she said softly, the cheque he’d passed across to her still clutched in her hand. ‘I just wish your mother were alive to see this,’ she added, aware that tears were now streaming down her face.

  Rose was sure she’d never forget that moment when John showed her his royalty cheque. Even when he’d explained why the amount was so high, she’d had difficulty grasping it. A simple enough wee thing, he’d said, but it helped stop the threads from breaking and the greatest time waster of all was when a machine stopped for one thread.

  It was only when she went to the bank and was persuaded to open a deposit account with a shiny, gold embossed pass book did she really believe what had happened. With this amount of money in the bank there’d no longer be any question of supporting Hannah and Sarah, as well as Jamie, in whatever career they might wish to follow. She put the pass book in Granny Sarah’s old handbag at the back of the sideboard and peeped at it now and again to reassure herself it wasn’t a pleasant dream.

  It seemed the Hamiltons were not the only ones to have had good fortune this year. In November and December, letters came to Ballydown from her sister Mary in Donegal, her older brothers in Scotland and Nova Scotia and her younger brother Sam in Pennsylvania, full of good news, new jobs, new houses, marriages and babies. From Gloucestershire, Lady Anne still lamented the move from Sligo, but she was heartily glad no one was now likely to shoot her husband simply because he was a landlord. She was hard at work refurbishing the draughty mansion he’d inherited from a distant cousin and encouraging him to take up his seat in the House of Lords and continue the work he’d begun as an Irish MP.

  There’d been good news too from their old home at Salter’s Grange. Their former neighbour, Mary-Anne Scott, once such a thorn in the flesh, had taken ill and died about eighteen months after their move. To their delight, their old friend Thomas had remarried a widow with a grown up son and daughter. Now, he and Selina had a little daughter of their own. But the news that delighted Rose most of all was of his eldest daughter, Annie. Bullied unmercifully by her mother, she’d been a poor downtrodden creature whom Rose had pitied but couldn’t dare to help. Thomas insisted that Rose would find her ‘well-improved’. She and her new step-mother were the best of friends and Selina had helped her find a job in a dress shop in Armagh. Now she was walking out with a young farmer from Ballyards. ‘A right sort of a fella,’ Thomas said approvingly.

  Rose was delighted to count up all these items of good news, but as she did so she felt troubled that her horizons seemed so narrow compared to Elizabeth. While her friend was concerned about the fate of Boers and Africans, she herself was more involved with the fate of an unhappy child, the victim of a mother, so obsessed with the wrath of God she had neither time, love nor kindness for her own child, or for her neighbours.

  She did read the local newspapers and The London
Illustrated News which Lady Anne sent her each week, but were it not for Elizabeth’s searching questions, she doubted she would give much attention to world events. Elizabeth always wanted to know what she thought about things, a local matter like a recent anti-Parnellite rally in Newry, or the latest bill going through Parliament, or the current crisis in South Africa.

  It was part of their commitment as Quakers to pursue peace and goodwill by all possible means, Elizabeth had once explained, and you couldn’t do that unless you were well informed.

  ‘But can you really know the truth about what’s going on, Elizabeth? Don’t you remember that story about the mill in Ballygawley, burnt down by disaffected workers? Then we found out it was a spark from a traction engine catching a thatched roof that had started it. Newspapers can only print the reports they get. How can you rely on them?’

  ‘Mostly we don’t. That’s why we write letters and set up committees of our own. It’s not perfect, but at least we can trust other Friends to try and see things as clearly as possible. One has to try, even if one fails.’

  Rose was impressed by her friend’s commitment, but she wondered what could ever be achieved in South Africa when you had two groups of people so determined to treat each other as enemies. She remembered well enough the Land League’s struggle and her brother Sam’s hard work for the people who were being exploited and evicted. True, much had been achieved, but the bitterness generated between landlords and tenants and between strong farmers and their tenants, had never gone away.

  Sam was now a successful land agent in Pennsylvania and a leading Trade Unionist. When she read his long letters, she was made so sharply aware of the disappointments he’d suffered. Even when he put a brave face on it, she knew he despaired of social justice as often in his new world as he’d once done in the old.