by Maggie Wadey
Nancy had married William Tanner at the Catholic church in Haywards Heath in the autumn of 1934. The bride’s father was described as a ‘farm labourer’, the groom’s father as a ‘police constable (retired)’ and Bill himself was described as working for the county council as a road labourer. Neither of the witnesses was a Kavanagh. The London Kavanaghs certainly disapproved of their sister’s marriage and had done their best to dissuade her. Dan told her she’d spend the rest of her life scraping the pennies together and Josie said a woman could tell, just looking at Bill, though what she could tell she didn’t say. Anyway, according to my mother, it was always Nancy and not her they used to get on at for marrying an Englishman. All of which might, I suppose explain, the young couple moving away to Sussex. But, when the war came, Tom found Bill work as a nightwatchman in Southall, and the family moved there.
In Southall Nancy lived on a long, treeless road of small grey-coloured houses. By that time – in the ’40s and ’50s – enough Indian immigrants had begun to arrive for people to remark on it. It never occurred to me to think that my mother and her sister were immigrants, too. My aunt Nancy – ‘Nancy with the laughing eyes’ – was still so pretty, with her black hair and blue eyes, her voice gravelly from smoking. She was careless and outspoken, unlike my mother in everything – or so it seemed to me – except that she, too, had married an Englishman. If the sisters ever reminisced about ‘the old days’, they never did so in my presence. They talked about their children – Nancy had three – about their husband’s jobs; they laughed about their sisters and speculated about the cat’s nightlife. My mother always gave Nancy the sweets and the clothing coupons from her ration book since very little of Bill’s earnings found their way to his wife.
We were grateful for the fact that since Bill worked nights he was usually asleep when we visited. But sometimes, as we sat on the pockmarked grass in the back garden, Bill’s grey, spoon-shaped face appeared at the bedroom window, casting silence on us like a spell. I intuited from my mother’s tone of voice whenever she spoke of her that Nancy was unhappy. Then, as the years went by, it became obvious that she was also unwell. There was always this very particular, deep sadness in my mother over her sister. Illness destroyed Nancy’s prettiness. The drugs used to combat the illness killed her. She was fifty-two when she died, the last of the Kavanagh children to be born, the second to go, and hers was one of the funerals we went to.
Within weeks of her arrival in England, Agnes found a live-in post as cook in a ‘big house’, bright and white with glittering windows, like those she’d seen from the train. Big houses were plentiful in this claustrophobically rich countryside of overpainted, swanky villages with their stands of ancient trees and dull, taciturn natives. No doubt Agnes could have found a post in several of these houses, but she chose Copse Hill because it was little more than a ten-minute bike ride from her sister.
Relief to be away from Nancy’s cheerfully shambolic rooms was tempered by the bone-chilling fact of her solitude. She unpacked her few belongings from the hatbox and distributed them about the room as she was supposed to: coat in the wardrobe (on a wooden hanger printed with the name of the Hotel Linden, Berlin), hairbrush on the dressing table, nightdress under the pillow, wondering at her own obedience, seeing herself as an animal trained to do what it has been told. Her heart froze. In God’s name what had she done to herself? Only now did she know how far she was from home. It was an amputation: sudden, irreversible. In this place she was without substance. No one looking at her here would know she had her mother’s beautiful eyes. The hard little armchair had oil from another woman’s hair on the headrest, and grease from another woman’s hands on the arms. It faced the fireplace, directing each inhabitant of this room how to sit, facing the fire, looking into the flames, feet up on a pretty little hassock embroidered with a bird of no particular kind. If you keep a rabbit, Agnes thought, you give it hay. And to a canary you give seed, to make it sing. You give a woman a footstool, and a pretty little bin for her sanitary towels.
On her day off she cycled into the village but no one spoke to her. She couldn’t for the life of her work out what was wrong with the miserable devils. So she cycled back to the house and, unsure if she was allowed to sit in the over-manicured garden (she wasn’t, at least not in sight of the house, which only left a small area behind a yew hedge which was used for the compost heap), she sat on her bed and watched sunlight unfold like a pale fan across the slate roof.
‘Tipperary?’ the housekeeper had said when they were introduced. ‘That’s a long way to go.’
She laughed at her own wit. After that, Agnes didn’t mention the word ‘Tipperary’ again. She didn’t want to see that smirk – ‘Irish, are you?’ – as if to answer ‘Yes’ was to admit to something comical or shameful. She was dismayed to find that Busherstown had not prepared her for the English. Her pride baulked at having to explain herself to cold, ignorant people who were fixed like oysters in their superiority. Silence had been one of the first lessons she learned at school. Now she was learning what to hear and what not to. She became adept at having, apparently, not picked up either news or gossip. It was now that, speaking only when necessary, almost unconsciously Agnes began to lose her Irish brogue.
There’s a question mark over exactly which year this was. As early as 1934, or as late as 1936? My father always believed Lindfield was my mother’s first position in England and that the Whittingtons, whom she liked, were her first English employers. But she spoke to me of being first in this other household, where she had not been happy, with people she described as being ‘vulgar’, and ‘having no idea how to treat servants’. My mother had sniffed out ‘new money’. Another word she used was ‘abrupt’. But everything – the lady of the house, the menus, the silver as well as the manner of speaking – everything was compared unfavourably with Busherstown where she’d learned not only skill but refinement of an especially Irish, inclusive kind.
On one of our evenings together, sensing she was in a relaxed mood, I asked if she’d found England – and the English in general – difficult when she first came over here.
‘I did,’ she said. ‘It was horrid. So unfriendly.’ A laugh, and then she added, ‘I don’t know, I think perhaps they’re afraid of us. But very unfriendly. When I think what it was like back there at home…’
Joe Hogan wrote in the Irish Post, ‘The past and memory, the immigrant’s curse, especially the Irish. The Irish pushed out of Ireland were left with one thing and that was their memory, their own hidden Ireland. Of course they handed it on to their children. What else did they have?’
But in this, as in so many ways, my mother was not typical. The last thing she wanted to hand on to her child was her memory of Ireland. Hidden is what it remained. She went forward, she forgot, she cast off. She took up every little clue thrown her way and pieced together plans for her future. She was young. She was strong. Maybe there’s murder at the heart of emigration as often as there’s preservation, as much forgetting as there is memory. She did not, however, forget her parents. She wrote to let them know she had settled, and she enclosed a money order to cover the purchase of a pair of fine breeding geese. The following year she took up her position as cook at Lindfield, and life took a turn for the better.
She once said of being ‘in service’ that it gave you everything you needed. Except freedom. ‘But then,’ my mother said. ‘I never minded that.’ By which I think she meant the lack of sexual freedom didn’t worry her. The freedom that mattered to her flourished inside that other, apparent lack of freedom: she was her own mistress, free to reinvent herself and, by the time she met my father she resembled – in appearance and style – no one so much as Mrs Simpson, the king’s consort. But my mother didn’t like the comparison and when it was first made, she had her hair cut short. However, like Mrs Simpson, she never cast off that air of being different, of being an outsider, an enigma.
After my mother’s death, I asked my father for something in her ha
ndwriting. My father found a recipe for queen’s pudding: gelatin, caster sugar, egg whites, angelica. She had a pretty, rather unusual hand, neat and feminine without being at all flowery. I tried the recipe one day, following the instructions exactly – not my usual way with a recipe – and, predictably, it worked perfectly. Some months later, I was sorting through my mother’s books. A photograph of Bruce Chatwin cut from a newspaper article fell out of his novel, The Viceroy of Ouidah, and a folded sheet of yellowing paper out of a book I’d given her: Lady Gregory’s Selected Writings. Like a sheet torn from an old exercise book but, disappointingly, there was nothing on it.
Then I realised it was being used to mark a page on which the title of the poem had been underlined: ‘May’. Not just the title, but some of the phrases were underlined: ‘the sad restless sea is asleep’, ‘the girl in her comely power’, ‘the cold has caught the wings of the birds.’ I’d never known my mother do this before. I believe I blushed at the sense I had of glimpsing her private world. Usually she didn’t even turn down the corner of a page. To annotate would be unthinkable. This book, another I’d given my mother but not read myself, now became my constant companion – a cliché, but, in the months following her death, that’s exactly how it felt. I was sure that this was a poem she had first read at school when she began to study Gaelic literature.
When David came to the kitchen door that evening, the first thing Agnes noticed was his youth. He was scarcely more than a boy. A strikingly handsome boy, true, but it was not – so she would have us believe – his good looks that made her accept his offer to accompany her to the dance. It was the fact that, within minutes, she’d decided she could trust him. That’s how she put it to me all those years later: ‘I felt I could trust your father.’ And she was right. David was, and still is, kind, reliable, trustworthy. I always had the impression that from my mother’s point of view his trustworthiness had something to do with his being English – and a great deal to do with his not being Irish.
But, as I was about to discover, there was one secret she never did entrust him with.
3
‘uisce fe talamh’ – an old Irish saying, literally: water under the ground
I have an unexpected call from Joan Cleary, inviting me to tea. When I put my head round the kitchen door she gives me her most deeply knowing smile.
‘There’s someone I want you to meet,’ she says. ‘Will I wet the tea?’
She does so, then disappears into the depths of the house and I hear the low murmur of voices. I stand looking at the Sacred Heart on the kitchen wall and at the same time, by a curiously Renaissance-like painterly trick of propinquity, through a little window just to one side of it, at a square of green sloping field where a cow grazes in the afternoon sunshine. I imagine one of the purposes of doing this in Renaissance paintings was not just to show off the artist’s skills but also to suggest how life continues outside the narrow focus of the picture – in this case, Christ’s suffering – to suggest other places, other times. Indeed, to ‘put things into perspective’.
A few minutes later, Joan and I carry a tray through to the sitting room, passing as we do so the front door, the door Kate Cleary opened that night to the soldiers of the North Hants Regiment – the soldiers who ‘politely’ took away two young men sleeping in the house, and murdered them. The panels of the door are filled with pretty ornamental glass and, arriving at the house earlier, I had noticed pots of geraniums on the doorstep. My eye had also been taken by an expensive-looking silvery car on the driveway. The sitting room is a pleasant shadowy room I’ve never been in before. A woman I would guess is in her early seventies rises from the chair, with that slight hesitation I recognise as accommodating the pain of arthritis. She’s tall, with blue eyes set in a face that has something indefinably familiar about it. Joan introduces us – ‘Catherine is an old family friend,’ she tells me, ‘here for the blessing of the graves’; I have time to wonder idly who Catherine might have to remember here in the Knigh graveyard – and then, rather to my surprise, she leaves us alone. I am in an atmosphere of intense, unexplained emotion. There is a pause. Catherine’s mouth opens to speak.
‘I’m your aunt Nancy’s daughter,’ she says. ‘Born the wrong side of the blanket.’
Catherine was brought up by a foster mother, Mrs Hogan, in County Kildare. Mrs Hogan was an elderly widow who had no children of her own and only now – for both money and company – thought to foster a child from the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society in Dublin. Catherine had always known that ‘Mammy’ was not her natural mother. She recalled being told how, when she was handed over there’d been an older woman with the girl, and the older woman had to say several times over, ‘Come on Nan,’ to urge the mother to give away her seven-month-old baby. This was in August 1931. A week later, Mrs Hogan wrote to the fostering agency:
This is just a note to tell you that the baby is getting on grand and quiet at home. Never made a bit strange and out every day in pram. I got one in Dublin that day and bottle. The pram is chair and bed. Cost 9 shillings but what matter when it suited the baby and it does eat bread and milk and Neaves food. I got oil for it also and powder. It is doing splendid so far and quiet. Everybody is delighted with it.
By ‘everybody’, Mrs Hogan must have meant neighbours, as she lived alone and had neither relations nor friends. The following summer, Catherine was diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia and spent two weeks in hospital. When she was safely home again Mrs Hogan wrote,
‘My darling baby is better thank God but has got awful weak and very thin. You would not hardly know her as she was so fat. She will take a lot of care and nourishment. I did give her Bovril, New Milk and a little Whiskey. I do have her out again in the pram for her good. It was very lonely while she was away.’
The secretary of the agency replied saying she was glad Catherine was home again and informing Mrs Hogan that she had, of course, to deduct from her maintenance cheque the two weeks and five days that the little one had spent in hospital – a burden on the State rather than on Mrs Hogan.
Mrs Hogan appears to have been genuinely fond of the child. She was never unkind. But the fact is she was almost entirely unfit to play the role of mother. There was little natural affection expressed. Catherine says that Mrs Hogan was a bit – she searches for the word – well, there was a ‘streak’ in the family. At first, Catherine was treated more like a pet bird than a baby. Later, ‘Mammy’ frequently forgot to buy or prepare food, and just as often, Catherine would come home from school to find no one there. She would sit on the doorstep until dark, when Mammy would drift home, having gone off to gather firewood and forgotten about the girl, literally forgotten she existed, so that she would start at the sight of her. Yet she taught the little girl to read and write before she went to school, and when the mood was on her she sang old songs from her own childhood though she could never remember the words.
Mrs Hogan was a retired bookkeeper at the family draper’s in Monasterevin in County Kildare. She lived just outside the town in a tiny cottage on the canal. The child Catherine was imprinted with such dire warnings about the dangers of the canal she grew up terrified of water. Mrs Hogan received £1 10s per month from the Society. The Society was, of course, a Catholic institution, but when Mammy was annoyed with Catherine she used to throw it at her that she’d come from ‘the Birds’ Nest’ (nickname for Protestant ‘Homes’). Why she should have come from a Protestant Home, the child had no idea, but it was an accusation that made her into an alien. She describes herself as growing like a mushroom, popping up overnight without roots, come from nowhere. Or worse.
As a girl, Catherine did not have robust health but she turned out to be very bright. ‘Always being very brilliant,’ as her school principal described her, ‘and able to say her prayers both in Irish and in English.’ But there was never a spare penny; not for clothes, not for schoolbooks, and certainly not – in spite of Catherine’s studying hard and being very anxious to get on – a chance of
her staying on beyond the minimum school-leaving age of fourteen. And Catherine admits that, bright as she was, she was also troublesome. Mammy wrote to the Society complaining that Catherine was not going to school, that she was smoking and staying out late at night. The sort of behaviour that is a hundred times more significant in the illegitimate child of an unknown mother. Catherine’s opportunities seemed to be narrowing down into the familiar pattern: service at the big house and early marriage. Then fate stepped in: a free place was offered with the Sisters of Mercy in Athy to any bright girl wishing to start her training as a nurse. Catherine jumped at the chance.
It turned out a mixed blessing. The ‘training’ didn’t amount to much and Catherine was worked so hard she became ill with glandular fever. As soon as she had recovered, she took her savings and travelled to England, to Liverpool. There the newly founded NHS embraced her. She was given the opportunity to qualify as a nurse, though one unexpected problem cropped up: having done so much of her schoolwork in Gaelic, Catherine needed evening classes in English in order to cope with the written medical examinations. At first she was homesick and exhausted, but after two years she had her SEN badge – not the full SRN qualification, and a green uniform rather than the blue one she craved, but still an achievement. Then, Catherine fell pregnant to a young Irish ambulance driver, Seamus. History looked set to repeat itself. Only it didn’t. Their feeling for one another was real. Catherine adored him. They married and five months later their son arrived, legitimate but premature and weighing only four pounds. It was thought he might not survive. But Catherine was determined nothing would take her baby from her. He flourished.